MetaGodoc

This is an attempt to create an alternative to https://godoc.org with more features and stuff.

The primary inspiration is Perl's https://metacpan.org site, which provides a search engine along with a display of all sorts of useful info about the packages it indexes.

Like MetaCPAN, this project uses Elasticsearch as the primary backend for indexing information about packages. If it ever evolves to the point of having logins and such we may also need a SQL database of somet sort (or maybe not).

Random Thoughts on Future Features

Here's a brain dump of things I'd like to achieve with this project ...

All Versions Indexed

For packages which are tagging releases, it'd be really nice to allow users to browse the documentation of each release. We'll always want to index the HEAD of the default branch as well, and that should be the default view for most packages.

How this plays nicely with packages that use gopkg.in is very much TBD, but obviously it should.

Rich Metadata

One of the things I really like about MetaCPAN is the sidebar for a package. See https://metacpan.org/release/Moose for example. The left hand side links to its changelog, website, git repo, reported issues, package review, and more.

While Golang packages don't have all those things (changelogs, sigh), we can certainly link to the repo, offer information about issues, etc.

Better Documentation Organization

The default organization of go Package documentation is not very helpful. Presenting things in an arbitrary order is generally not the best way for users to understand the package.

This is especially problematic for monster packages like https://godoc.org/gopkg.in/olivere/elastic.v6. This is so huge that Chrome has trouble scrolling it smoothly.

And finding anything in it is really difficult. Now, in part, the onus to improve this is on the package author. Splitting this one package up into multiple packages would greatly improve the presentation.

However, it would still be nice to allow package authors more control over the presentation of their documentation.

My vague thought is that package authors could add a metagodoc.json file to their repo that would provide instructions on how to present their documentation. For example, they could specify something like "show the docs for these symbols" first or even provide a more sophisticated grouping of symbols to be split up across multiple pages.

This is all very handwavy at this point, but it's something that is really needed.

Better Search

I think using Elastic has the potential to make for much better search results. We can consider many things:

Location of words in the text (package name vs synopsis vs buried somewhere in there).
Other content in the repo, such as README files and other docs.
Import count - how many other packages use this one? Can we come up with a River of Go like the River of CPAN?
Fork vs not fork.
How active is the repository?

And yes, I know godoc.org already factors some of those things in.

Modern UI

At the very least, a wider central column.

Random Other Stuff

It'd be nice to be able to see all the repos from a single author, like MetaCPAN's author view.

Insert Your Feature here.

autarch/metagodoc