Automated Link Checking

[Michael-F-Bryan]

I'm assuming this guide is going to contain lots of links to various bits and pieces around the rust-lang/rust repository, so it's probably a good idea to set up some sort of link checking in CI.

I've made a backend for mdbook which will read your book and check all the links are valid called mdbook-linkcheck. We'll be making another release in the next couple days (rust-lang/mdBook#558) which will include alternate backends and allow us to use mdbook-linkcheck as part of the usual dev process.

This issue is mostly just a reminder for myself. When the next version of mdbook is up on crates.io I'll come back and make a PR including mdbook-linkcheck in CI.

[nikomatsakis]

Yes, this would be great. One of the things I have been wondering is how to link to functions -- or maybe even snippets -- in the Rust source. I'd like it if the book were moved into the Rust repository so that changes to the Rust source would not build if they broke the book; but in the meantime, I suppose a "simple" solution would be to have the rustdoc for the compiler posted somewhere, which would give us the ability to link to methods/functions/etc.

[Michael-F-Bryan]

I've got a copy of the internal docs which are recompiled and uploaded daily. Would it be worth asking people to link to that?

All I did was translate an old shell script of mine into Rust and then set up cron to make sure the program gets run while I'm asleep, so if the tool can help here feel free to use/fork it. I remember talk of making a better solution, but I don't think anything came of it.

[nikomatsakis]

@Michael-F-Bryan maybe we could put it on rust-lang-nursery or forge or some such?

So long as we are an external guide, of course, we have to think about a policy to detect rot -- i.e., compiler changes, we have to adapt.

[nikomatsakis]

Still, I wonder how hard it is to get that "better solution" up and going. Maybe an excuse to learn something about infra.