Bye Bye WebRI
December 1, 2012
Bye Bye WebRI
RDoc 4.0 is coming out and it can now render documentation directly from ri stores. That’s super great news. I had written just such a program back in 2008 called WebRI. It was a terrible hack, and slow as molasses running up a tree. So it never got much use. But it was still pretty neat because it made it possible to browse all installed gems in one go. It was wild to see every single class and module of every gem listed in the side pane. I hope RDoc 4.0 will be able to do something like that. Even so I am certain it will be better in just about every other way. My implementation may have sucked, but the idea was obviously a good one. It’s always nice to feel a bit of vindication in that way.
Of course, this also means that WebRI is completely obsolete now. Come the new year I will delete the repository and yank the gem. No reason to keep useless cruft about.
BTW As of next year I will have been programming in Ruby for over a decade. Ten fucking years!