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docs: Move everything to docs.rs #3952

Merged
merged 1 commit into from Jul 19, 2022
Merged

docs: Move everything to docs.rs #3952

merged 1 commit into from Jul 19, 2022

Commits on Jul 19, 2022

  1. docs: Move everything to docs.rs

    A couple of things happened when preparing to release 3.0
    - We needed derive documentation
      - I had liked how serde handled theres
      - I had bad experiences finding things in structopt's documentation
    - The examples were broken and we needed tests
    - The examples seemed to follow a pattern of having tutorial content and
      cookbook content
    - We had been getting bug reports from people looking at master and
      thinking they were looking at what is currently released
    - We had gotten feedback to keep down the number of places that
      documentation was located
    
    From this, we went with a mix of docs.rs and github
    - We kept the number of content locations at 2 rather than 3 by not
      having an external site like serde
    - We rewrote the examples into explicit tutorials and cookbooks to align
      with the 4 styles of documentation
    - We could test our examples by running `console` code blocks with
      trycmd
    - Documentation was versioned and the README pointed to the last release
    
    This had downsides
    - The tutorials didn't have the code inlined
    - Users still had a hard time finding and navigating between the
      different forms of documentation
    - In practice, we were less likely to cross-link between the different
      types of documentation
    
    Moving to docs.rs would offer a lot of benefits, even if it is only
    designed for Rust-reference documentation and isn't good for Rust derive
    reference documentation, tutorials, cookbooks, etc.  The big problem was
    keeping the examples tested to keep maintenance costs down.  Maybe its
    just me but its easy to overlook
    - You can pull documentation from a file using `#[doc = "path"]`
    - Repeated doc attributes get concatenated rather than first or last
      writer winning
    
    Remember these when specifically thinking about Rust documentation made
    me realize that we could get everything into docs.rs.
    
    When doing this
    - Tutorial code got brought in as was one of the aims
    - We needed to split the lib documentation and the README to have all of
      the linking work.  This allowed us to specialize them according to
      their rule (user vs contributor)
    - We needed to avoid users getting caught up in making a decision
      between Derive and Builder APIs so we put the focus on the derive API
      with links to the FAQ to help users decide when to use one or the
      other.
    - Improved cross-referencing between different parts of the
      documentation
    - Limited inline comments were added to example code
      - Introductory example code intentionally does not have teaching
        comments in it as its meant to give a flavor or sense of things and
        not meant to teach on its own.
    
    This is a first attempt.  There will be a lot of room for further
    improvement.  Current know downsides:
    - Content source is more split up for the tutorials
    
    This hopefully addresses clap-rs#3189
    epage committed Jul 19, 2022
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