problem-solving
problem-solving copied to clipboard
Raku
Documentation and the ecosystem
Right now, there's a module called p6doc which you can download using zef. However, once downloaded it does not really do anything sensible, other than producing errors which, in turn, produce confusion. Those errors can be fixed, but the real issue is that documentation is not an installable module. There are a couple of modules in the lib directory, mainly helpers for testing the documentation, but that's that. If you want to actually have the documentation, you will need to get into the directory zef has downloaded it into, install Documentable, and run it according to instructions. That's something that you can obviously achieve more easily just cloning the repo, and you will avoid any kind of confusion. Even if you do that, you'll end up with something that's already on the web, easily accessible from anywhere.
My solution for this would be to simply remove p6doc from the ecosystem. As a developer, there's nothing really useful there since all business logic has moved elsewhere. There's the problem of accessing documentation from the command line, though, which is something we might want to have; but that's moved elsewhere, to rakudoc, which can use its own means to install and access the documentation.
If we want to move in the other direction, to actually make it useful somehow as installed, there's the issue of actually making documentation available as a CUR repository or some other way that can be accessed using %?RESOURCES that's a different kettle of fish, however. We might want to do it, but it will need resources and time. It's not incompatible with the first option, so for the time being I would opt for just eliminating it from the ecosystem.
Alternatively, we could substitute it by a kinda-rakubrew that would download the documentation, Documentable and install it in your system, if you so want...