1432445 - Host Spidermonkey documentation in tree

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Core :: JavaScript Engine, enhancement, P3)

Description

[Benjamin Bouvier [:bbouvier] (inactive)]

Just a reminder to myself that could be of interest to others too:

https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/index.html#managing-documentation

TL;DR we can easily host documentation in tree, in js/src/docs directory for instance, then set SPHINX_TREES['spidermonkey'] = 'docs' in js/src/moz.build. Then the documentation should appear on https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org in a Spidermonkey area, and be rebuilt as soon as the source changes.

We already have a doc/ directory under js/src/ that we could move to js/src/docs and rst formatting, as a nice start.

Comment 1

[Jeff Walden [:Waldo]]

FWIW the MDN people are looking to move all Mozilla-specific docs off MDN to elsewhere, fairly soon -- got mail from Chris Mills about this recently.  It sounds like there's probably going to be some docs from them on how one would go about doing this, wrt something like the URL in comment 0.  (Although I think SpiderMonkey having its own separate docs-page, not embedded within the overall Firefox docs, is desirable to emphasize our status as an embeddable, standalone project not wholly subordinate to Firefox.)

Also I vaguely remember someone poached a read-the-docs name for this, but I don't remember the name off the top of my head and *may* well be imagining that ever happened.

Comment 2

[Benjamin Bouvier [:bbouvier] (inactive)]

I registered http://spidermonkey.readthedocs.io (empty at the moment), just so we can keep the name. It's linked to a(n empty) git repository, which ownership I would be glad to give back to the mozilla org: https://github.com/bnjbvr/spidermonkey-docs

Comment 3

[Florian Scholz (Open Web Docs)]

Please let me know if I can be of any help from the MDN side of things.

Comment 4

[Ted Campbell [:tcampbell]]

• Some docs were flushed out in Firefox Source Docs in Bug 1685958 and follow-ups.
• We now have https://spidermonkey.dev as a landing point for the project that points to stuff in more robust places. Bug 1596457
• Bug 1471272 used the [SMDOC] slug to highlight the in-source documentation that already exists.
• The mozilla-spidermonkey/spidermonkey-embedding-examples github repo also archived some of the MDN pages and did a few updates at the same time.

The old opcode data on MDN is stale and while we do have a script to generate it, we don't keep it up to date as often as bytecode changes. Similarly the JSAPI is not exactly a stable API and the process to split it up continues to happen.

I think we can call the original objective here accomplished though.