Hacker News Reader

I think in terms of providing the widest coverage, I think Dash[0] which has been in the offline documentation space for a long time should have everyone beat.

[0]: https://blog.kapeli.com/dash-8

View on HN

Appreciate you opening my eyes to this. Dash is indeed comprehensive, and a much bigger initiative. I wonder how it's handling the documentation staleness issue? New docs are published every minute.

For the package manager ecosystem it supports, it relies on the projects auto-generated docs, and the builds the docsets from those. I guess it does that step in a cached on-demand way. That way, it can provide docs to all the packages and package versions.

E.g. for Rust: Crate is published crates.io -> triggers automatic docs build on docs.rs -> Dash clients can now pull docsets through a proxy that builds the docsets built on the static HTML bundles built for docs.rs.

I see, yes, with this implementation, the networking component becomes necessary. I made different design decisions for `py-dep-man-companion` such that the tool is fully offline and can be used with local llms.

Dash doesn't seem to be open source, plus it's a subscription model. Nothing against that, but OPs solution is MIT licensed.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com