Thanks for the constructive example of the rust doc.
I am not making things up when I say that the very first question I had about how to use this module, either is not answered, or I couldn't find the answer. That question was "what regular expression syntax is supported?". This is such a fundamental question, yet there is no answer provided.
As a preference thing, I don't really like examples in APIs (it is supposed to be a reference in my opinion) and I find them to be mostly noise.
> Why would I want to edit the documentation of an external library
I'm consuming when I'm reading it? And even if I do then the effort
to make a PR changing those docs pales in comparison to the effort
it takes to open the original source code with the docs and edit it.
Right, this is possibly where our experiences differ. I'm frequently pulling in loads of code, some of which I've written, some of which other people have written, and when I pull in code to a project I take ownership of it. Doesn't matter who wrote it - if it is in my project, then I'm going to make sure it is up to the standards I expect. A lot of the time, the code is stuff I've written anyway, which means that when I come back in a few months time and go to use it, I find that things that seemed obvious at the time might not be so obvious, and a simple comment can completely fix it. Sometimes it is a comment and a code change ("wouldn't it be nice if this function handled edge case X nicely? I'll just go in there and fix it").
The distinction between external and internal that you have looks pretty different to me, and that could just be why we have different opinions.
The parent linked to a subsection showing usage for a particular object. If you click back into the root level for the document there is a header specifying ‘syntax’, and other more ‘package-level’ documentation
> I am not making things up when I say that the very first question I had about how to use this module, either is not answered, or I couldn't find the answer. That question was "what regular expression syntax is supported?". This is such a fundamental question, yet there is no answer provided.
This is a fair question to have. As others have already said, this is the API reference for a particular class, so you won't get the high level details here. You can click in the upper left corner to go to the high level docs for the whole library.
> The distinction between external and internal that you have looks pretty different to me, and that could just be why we have different opinions.
Well, there are two "external" vs "internal" distinctions I make:
1. Code I maintain, vs code that I pull in as an external dependency from somewhere else (to give an example, something like libpng, zlib, etc.). So if I want to fix something in the external dependency I make a pull request to the original project. Here I need to clone the original project, find the appropriate files to edit, edit them, make sure it compiles, make sure the tests pass, make a PR, etc. Having the header file immediately editable doesn't net me anything here because I'm not going to edit the original header files to make the change (which are either installed globally on my system, or maintained by my package manager somewhere deep under my /home/).
2. Code that is part of my current project, vs code that is a library that I reuse from another of my projects. These are both "internal" in a sense that I maintain them, but to my current project those are "external" libraries (I maintain them separately and reuse in multiple projects, but I don't copy-paste them and instead maintain only one copy). In this case it's a fair point that if you're browsing the API reference it's extra work to have to open up the original sources and make the change there, but I disagree that it's making things any harder. I still have to properly run any relevant unit tests of the library I'm modifying, still have to make a proper commit, etc., and going from the API reference to the source code takes at most a few seconds (since the API reference will tell me which exact file it is, so I just have to tell my IDE's fuzzy file opener to open up that file to me.) and is still a tiny fraction of all of the things I'd need to do to make the change.
> I am not making things up when I say that the very first question I had about how to use this module, either is not answered, or I couldn't find the answer. That question was "what regular expression syntax is supported?". This is such a fundamental question, yet there is no answer provided.
I am not making things up when I say that the very first question I had about how to use this module, either is not answered, or I couldn't find the answer. That question was "what regular expression syntax is supported?". This is such a fundamental question, yet there is no answer provided.
As a preference thing, I don't really like examples in APIs (it is supposed to be a reference in my opinion) and I find them to be mostly noise.
> Why would I want to edit the documentation of an external library I'm consuming when I'm reading it? And even if I do then the effort to make a PR changing those docs pales in comparison to the effort it takes to open the original source code with the docs and edit it.
Right, this is possibly where our experiences differ. I'm frequently pulling in loads of code, some of which I've written, some of which other people have written, and when I pull in code to a project I take ownership of it. Doesn't matter who wrote it - if it is in my project, then I'm going to make sure it is up to the standards I expect. A lot of the time, the code is stuff I've written anyway, which means that when I come back in a few months time and go to use it, I find that things that seemed obvious at the time might not be so obvious, and a simple comment can completely fix it. Sometimes it is a comment and a code change ("wouldn't it be nice if this function handled edge case X nicely? I'll just go in there and fix it").
The distinction between external and internal that you have looks pretty different to me, and that could just be why we have different opinions.