Downloadable docs

[Kapeli]

I'd like to integrate docs.rs inside Dash.

To achieve this, I need a way to download the docs for a package as HTML files. Please consider supporting this.

edit(@jyn514): see #174 (comment) for mentoring instructions.

[njskalski]

How about just sharing the database dump, like a backup.torrent or whatever. Crates.io for sure have a backup, this way some users will co-host it for free.

[ketsuban]

That's not an acceptable solution - note that @Kapeli isn't just asking for tossing the database over the wall, they specific want to integrate docs.rs into a offline documentation viewer so that users can download the documentation for specific crates as needed. The docset format isn't exclusive to Dash, either - other projects such as Zeal also make use of it.

[Kapeli]

One note: I'm not asking for docs.rs to generate Dash docsets. I'm asking for it to provide downloadable docs.

[lilyball]

I'd really love to see this done. I use Dash for everything else and it's really annoying dealing with third-party Rust crate docs since I can't view them anywhere outside a web browser.

[reeze]

I am really looking forward this integration.

[dmilith]

Can't wait for both integration and Rust syntax coloring support for Dash snippets :)

[libratiger]

is there any progress or any new plan?

[nhynes]

It'd also be nice to get the nightly rustc docs without having to build the rustc. Recursive wget is a(n inefficient) workaround, I suppose.

[brinsche]

https://github.com/Robzz/cargo-docset was recently released, maybe that's enough for some people here or maybe the some of the code can be reused and integrated into docs.rs somehow

[nanne007]

Any update on this?

[pietroalbini]

It's not too practical to generate a downloadable archive of a crate's documentation, as each file is stored individually on S3.

We'd need to fetch all the files individually and generate an archive of that on the fly, which is not practical for large crates. Preparing an archive at build time and storing it separately would increase our storage costs, and due to the unbounded nature of docs.rs we should try avoiding that.

If y'all have better implementation ideas I'd love to read them.

[lilyball]

Could we prepare an archive at build time but only for crates that are opted in to this using some notion of "important to the community"? For example I'd love to see docs.rs provide a docset for tokei that Dash can keep automatically up-to-date. I don't know who'd provide that curation though. There could be some way to nominate crates and leave it up to the docs.rs maintainers to approve it, or maybe it could be based on traffic to a particular crate's documentation.