Dave Thomas wrote:
> 
> On Jan 28, 2004, at 21:54, Joel VanderWerf wrote:
> 
>> Joel VanderWerf wrote:
>>
>>> Sam Roberts wrote:
>>>
>>>> Ack, forget this.
>>>>
>>>> I found the docs. link:// is needed to make it realize its a hyperlink
>>>> to a local file.
>>
>>
>> I found that this works, sort of:
>>
>>   link:files/doc/my_file_txt.html
> 
> 
> I've been looking at this, but it turns out to be somewhat harder that 
> it should be. The issue is one of relative file paths. In order to do 
> the hyperlinking, RDoc has to read all the source and then generate the 
> HTML (because there may be references to classes that haven;t been read 
> yet in early files). However, that also means that one class may be 
> defined in multiple files. The way RDoc builds its information about 
> class and module documentation, I can't tell which particular file a 
> comment came from. Instead, I just know the list of files that 
> contribute to the class the comment is associated with.
> 
> However, when you say doc/my_file.rb, I need to see if I know anything 
> about a file called 'my_file.rb' in the doc subdirectory or the 
> directory containing the file containing the comment (phew!). I just 
> don't have that information.
> 
> I'm looking to see what it would take to add it, but I'm also worried 
> about performance: with a large number of files and the potential for 
> large numbers of spurious matches on things that look like file names, 
> this could get slow.

Sounds painful, and not worth the effort. As a workaround, how about 
some way of relabeling a link: entry? Something like:

   label[link:files/doc/my_file_txt.html]

which would behave just like

   link:files/doc/my_file_txt.html

(which works now) but would look like

   label

in the browser?