RubySpec link-up with RubyDoc

Charles Oliver Nutter <[email protected]> Tue, 27 Mar 2007 14:09:57 -0500
Newsgroups gmane.comp.lang.ruby.documentation
Message-ID <[email protected]>
For those of you who don't know, RubySpec is a MediaWiki-based attempt 
of mine to get community members to work together building a Ruby 
specification. I figure this is the only real way we're going to get to 
a complete spec, and it would additionally provide a comprehensive 
online reference for the language itself.

Ruby-Doc does a great job of documenting what the Ruby developers have 
been able to document, but it doesn't comprise a spec. Specifically, 
deeper details of the language syntax, library implementation, and 
platform or impl-specific quirks are largely missed. I'm hoping that 
RubySpec can become the clearinghouse for such information.

RubySpec hasn't gotten a lot of attention, but there's a reasonable 
start there and a few documents I've never seen published in any English 
text or site. Because it seems like an important thing for us to do 
(important enough that both matz and _why have made edits) I'd love for 
Ruby-Doc to swallow it up. This would probably mean the following:

- I will move RubySpec to the host where jruby's continuous integration 
and nightly builds are executing. It's a real hosting provider with all 
the trimmings, and they've set up PHP/MySQL for me to make the move
- We'd want a better domain...the machine is jruby.thresher.com right 
now and just goes straight into Bamboo (our CI server)
- I'd be very pleased if there were prominent links from Ruby-Doc to 
appropriate pages in RubySpec as they become available. I think we need 
to drive people toward the spec as much as possible, since it's publicly 
updateable and should build upon the knowledge we share.

The current home is at www.headius.com/rubyspec and comes up as the 
first hit for "rubyspec" on google. A few notable articles:

http://www.headius.com/rubyspec/index.php/Ruby_Threading
http://www.headius.com/rubyspec/index.php/Ruby_Standard_Library
http://www.headius.com/rubyspec/index.php/Marshaling
http://www.headius.com/rubyspec/index.php/Flow_Control

Most of this is community-contributed content, though I did most of the 
work on Threading.

Thoughts?

- Charlie