Provide a docs.all task about ex_doc

[pminten]

👍 A nice side effect will be that building documentation for lots of projects at the same time will be easy, just make a fake project and run docs.all.

[ericmj]

When a dependency has a source_url I don't think we should generate docs for it but rather just link to the docs maintained by the project.

[pminten]

Those docs may be of a different version though, so there could be API differences.

[josevalim]

Right. And there is also the benefit of having offline docs.

[ericmj]

Those are both good points. We can probably only solve the docs versioning issue when we have a package manager.

[pminten]

I'll take a stab at this.

[pminten]

Once we have this a logical follow-up feature would be to extend autolinking to dependency projects.

[pminten]

Quick progress report on this: I have a basic index working, it looks like this:

I'm just not satisfied with the code structure yet. I'm currently having the html formatter write docs/$project/.ex_doc_project_info files which look like this:

# ExDoc generated project information, do not edit
[project: "json", version: "0.2.6", documented_modules: [{JSON, nil}, {JSON.Decode, nil}, {JSON.Decode.Error, :exception}, {JSON.Decode.UnexpectedEndOfBufferError, :exception}, {JSON.Decode.UnexpectedTokenError, :exception}, {JSON.Dynamo.Filter, nil}, {JSON.Dynamo.Filter.FilterResultObject, nil}, {JSON.Dynamo.Filter.ProcessFilteredResponse, nil}, {JSON.Encode, :protocol}, {JSON.Encode.Error, :exception}, {JSON.Numeric, nil}]]

When --no-index isn't passed to ex_doc the html formatter will read all .ex_doc_project_info files under the docs dir and use them to generate the project index.

Thing is though, reading and writing these files isn't really a job for the html formatter, nor is it really a job for the retriever. I'm still mulling over how to properly integrate those project infos in the ex_doc structure. Sooner or later I'll probably find a way, but that's what's holding up this feature at the moment.

[josevalim]

Couldn't you write the file from the ExDoc module?

[pminten]

Hmm, that might be Columbus' egg (is that even a valid English idiom). Thanks.