SoftbearStudios
Have docs.rs create docs for all features
Cargo.toml should have set
[package.metadata.docs.rs]
all-features = true
instead of just
features = [ "derive", "serde", "std" ]
This way a single search is enough to check whether bitcode itself supports a format and what feature flag is necessary to enable said format.
It took me quite a lot of time to realize, that bitcode does in fact support time.
I did not check the Cargo.toml, but rather expected the docs on docs.rs to be complete.
Docs.rs does show all the features, here: https://docs.rs/crate/bitcode/latest/features
It just doesn't show the API's related to disabled features. These API's could get cluttered if many more crates were supported.
I did compile the docs with all features. Imo. they looked perfectly fine and I instantly was able to determine, what crates bitcode supports.
If this is not an option, there should be a note in the Readme or somewhere in the docs, what other crates bitcode has support for.
Docs.rs does show all the features, here: https://docs.rs/crate/bitcode/latest/features
You're right about that.
Though docs.rs sais on the same page:
There is very little structured metadata to build this page from currently. You should check the main library docs, readme, or Cargo.toml in case the author documented the features in them.
And that is not an excuse for me not looking, but I simply did not think about checking the feature flags in docs.rs. (A contradictory statement 😬)
I still think, that there should be a top level doc with a table or something, that explains each feature.
There is very little structured metadata to build this page from currently.
Huh, this is confusing to me. I'm not sure what structured metadata we could add. Structured metadata seems separate from the docs you suggest. Are there any crates without this warning in there docs? I checked, and even serde has the warning.
That warning is shown for every crate.
Cargo.toml currently has no fields for documenting features.
So the feature page on docs.rs is quite bare.
When the features have a special meaning or should be easily found, then it is better to have them documented at top level.
Like this: https://docs.rs/tokio/latest/tokio/#feature-flags