Check all links to docs.rs in README are correct

[alecmocatta]

Neat project @mgeisler!

I often link to items in the docs at docs.rs in my README. I'd love to use this crate for checking the version of the docs linked is correct.

For example, at https://github.com/alecmocatta/palaver there are a bunch of links like https://docs.rs/palaver/0.2.8/palaver/thread/fn.gettid.html. I'd like to check that the 0.2.8 in the URL is in fact the current version.

I'm keen to hear what you think of this and how to approach it, but what I'm currently envisioning is something similar to assert_contains_regex, but rather than matching on a regex, the regex extracts strings which are compared with the current version.

A rough way this could work:

• assert_matches_regex!("README.md", "https://docs\.rs/{name}/{version_match}/");
• Runs a couple of extra replaces:
  • {name_match} => (?P<name>[^/]+)
  • {version_match} => (?P<version>[^/]+)
• Regex::captures_iter, and the name and version capture groups if they exist are asserted to match the actual name and version.

[mgeisler]

Hi @alecmocatta, thanks for the kind words!

Interesting problem and it sounds like useful functionality to have.

I don't know if it's documented anywhere, but I noticed that docs.rs understands a "latest" version. So you can link to https://docs.rs/palaver/latest/palaver/thread/fn.count.html in the README and it will redirect to 0.2.8 as of now. However, if you proceed to use this README when uploading to crates.io, old versions of the crate will end up pointing to "latest", which probably isn't what you want.

You could perhaps make some kind of release procedure which would replace /palaver/latest/ with the the concrete version number just before uploading the crate to crates.io. I think that would work, though if you don't commit this version of your README, the release downloaded from crates.io won't correspond to any commit in Git, which is a bit ugly.

So all in all, I think it could be interesting to have the kind of functionality you sketched :-)

[alecmocatta]

Thanks for the alternate ideas – both as you say have drawbacks. When I get a chance I'll go ahead and file a PR for this feature!