RDoc 2.2.0 is available! It can be downloaded here or through the gem system. This release is the result of work by RDoc’s developers and by the community, through both making suggestions and submitting patches. It is intended to provide a very stable cut of the 2.x functionality and also to fix several bugs that have lingered since the 1.x series. This version’s unit tests cover a much larger range of functionality than any prior version’s tests, although the tests’ coverage still is far smaller than it should be. I believe that this is the most reliable version yet. In addition to bug fixes, this release includes several enhancements. While the release notes list all of these, I am going to highlight a few of them.

A number of fixes and small enhancements were made to the template system. All built-in HTML templates now generate strict, valid XHTML. All of the bugs introduced during the switch to ERB templates in RDoc 2.0.0 have been fixed. In addition, this release provides basic support for creating HTML templates that do not use frames. The built-in frameless template is an example. 3rd-party templates also now are supported more smoothly. A template can be installed as a gem, and RDoc will find it with its -T command-line option. The beautiful Hanna template is such a 3rd-party template. This template eventually might be included with RDoc but for now easily can be used instead of the built-in templates. RDoc’s own documentation uses this template.

ri has been enhanced in several ways. All of its use cases are much faster, some many times so. In addition, Daniel Choi contributed a patch that adds an interactive mode; in this mode, ri gets input from the user in order to disambiguate method lookups and allows the user to browse a class’ methods. The search directory option (-d) also has been fixed, so that ri once again can look for documentation in a user-specified directory. ri’s caching scheme, which it uses to speed up its searches, is capable of caching documentation from user-specified directories, and so using this option does not result in any performance degradation.

A number of future enhancements have been identified that hopefully will improve RDoc dramatically. We would love input on its future technical direction and would welcome any new project volunteers.

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