Docs: revised READMEs for Rails frameworks

I have revised READMEs for Action Pack, Active Record, Action Mailer and Active Support. The introductory text in the first two frameworks has gone through substaintial changes, and all 4 have copies of improved “download / installation / support” sections:

http://github.com/mislav/rails/compare/bcec0f65…doc-readmes

The motivation for this was noticing that both Action Pack and Active Record READMEs mention certain features/syntax that has been either deprecated or removed, that some link to inexisting API docs URLs, that all of them link to RubyForge as the place where we can find the latest versions of these frameworks, and that Action Pack and Active Record installation instructions suggest that the reader should install the 1.x versions of the gems. Also, Active Record documentation used a certain vocabulary that might be unfamiliar to both beginner and intermediate Ruby developer.

I haven’t pushed this to docrails yet. Apart from posting this to the docs mailing list, I’ve also posted to the core list to give all Rails Core members a chance to skim over these changes and see if they are OK. Here is an example; Action Pack download/installation instructions: http://gist.github.com/481333

Suggestions welcome. Thanks

Overall these look really good - thanks for doing this! And the only typo I noticed was doubled word "It it" near the beginning of the Action Pack readme.

Jeff

Excellent work Mislav!

My only remark is about this sentence

"With Ruby on Rails framework, users only interface directly with Action Controller module."

which lacks a couple of articles or something.

As a curiosity, the API of some components is also published separately. For example

    http://as.rubyonrails.org/     http://ar.rubyonrails.org/

But it is not clear at this moment whether that will be the case in Rails 3. If it was, the Rakefiles of some components need to be revised (the key task to look for is pdoc). Also their READMEs.

It is fine to point to api.rubyonrails.org by now.

+1 to pushing it.

Improved and pushed!

http://github.com/lifo/docrails/compare/4ed9bd643…3e196db6ad

For the archives: Those separate sites won't be generated anymore.