On Nov 7, 2009, at 4:29 PM, Roger Pack wrote:

> Dan Berger wrote:
> 
>> On an unrelated note, how did you generate that pretty backtrace
>> information? Looks slick.
> 
> Hmm. Where is the slick backtrace again?

I think perhaps he means the spew from Passenger... I have to admit, Passenger's error panes always made me feel just a tiny bit less rage at seeing that something was broken.

>> across gem search. Honestly something like what ri can do across
>> classes would be enough. When I see an unfamiliar 'zabraboof' method,
>> instead of having to go back through the source to find what all gems
>> were included at any point, it'd be nice to be able to go to Allgems
>> and just search for it.
> 
> so this is just "search for method name x" and it finds the gem that ontains it?

Yup, that would be awesome.

>> Finally, as a sort of "out-there" suggestion... I got to thinking how
>> nice it would be to have a sort of "personalized" Allgems page. What
>> I'm imagining is a combination of some very basic (unauthenticated,
>> even) account tracking on the web app combined with a gem plugin. The
>> plugin would get a list of the gems installed on your system and push
>> them to Allgems. Then you could log-in to Allgems and see only the
>> documentation for the gems you currently have installed. Just an idea...
> 
> So this would be instead of the "massive list" a smaller list with just 
> installed gems?
> Would something unauthenticated and privacy invasive like
> /username [you specify it] be enough?

Yeah. Actually, I don't think it has to be "/username" specifically. It could be any custom string. I don't think there's a need for any authentication/privacy either, since any gem indexed by Allgems is, by definition, publicly available. Actually, I'm thinking these lists could be something to share with friends/co-workers (i.e. like Twitter lists). They might even serve as a useful way to collect a group of related gems (and maybe, with some Gem Bundler collaboration-foo, to install them as well)...so you could, for example, have the "Rails App with Avatar Thumbnail" package which might include Rails+dependencies, RMagick+dependencies, and Paperclip. Then the web page gives you one location to see documentation for just those gems.

Just an idea...