Std::fmt vs collections::fmt

shahn · 2015-12-20T23:57:52.211Z

The bug report https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/30477 brought up the issue that in beta and nightly, the docs for std::fmt aren’t available anymore using the std/fmt url prefix, but rather they’re in collections now. This seems a rather unfortunate and accidental change. Several questions arise from this: Should the pub mod fmt; line be removed from libcollections/lib.rs? That would, afaict, lead to a situation where at least they won’t show up in the docs in confusing places anymore. Would that be a change that breaks anything? How would we export fmt from libstd to make sure we break nothing and the docs are available again?

I thank steveklabnik (who suggested I start this discussion here), panicbit, bluss, aatch, and ubsan (and anyone I might’ve forgotten) to help illuminate this issue to me on irc.

shahn · 2015-12-21T00:43:16.624Z

https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/30213 has more context

bluss · 2015-12-22T06:24:25.451Z

I can’t reproduce, std::fmt is present and the links to formatting traits work

shahn · 2015-12-22T08:44:19.089Z

Looks like you’re right, it was somehow fixed in nightly (tho the docs are still also exported via https://doc.rust-lang.org/nightly/collections/fmt/index.html, which is probably confusing). The original behaviour I described is still observable on beta.

bluss · 2015-12-22T11:45:31.280Z

collections::fmt is just the implementation behind the façade, just like collections::vec is for std::vec though.

shahn · 2015-12-22T12:27:38.959Z

Yes, that much is clear to me - but having the docs show up in multiple places (also when keyword searching) seems confusing?

jethrogb · 2015-12-22T12:33:56.727Z

It is. We were also discussing on IRC yesterday that it’s confusing that the compiler sometimes emits type names with core:: or collections::, e.g. https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/25852

sfackler · 2015-12-22T17:41:54.015Z

We turned off compiler internals docs a while ago, and it seems like it would make sense to do the same for everything but libstd.

libcore is stable now which makes that a bit weird, but maybe its docs should be segregated off to the side?

system · 2019-03-25T08:25:36.378Z

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