I recently came across HexSearch and yesterday found yet another interesting thread on improving the experience of HexDocs (Introduce search across all of HexDocs · Issue #1811 · elixir-lang/ex_doc · GitHub). The latter is apparently aiming at changes at the ExDoc level, requiring documentation for a package to be regenerated to benefit from improvements.

Elixir documentation is generally top notch, specially for the most used libraries, however one of the things that I noticed with time is that the ExDoc/HexDocs experience can be quite inconsistent depending on the version of ExDoc used to build docs for a package.

That means clicking links that take you to another package may change the UI drastically, both aesthetically and functionally. Navigating to older versions of documentation for a given page has a similar effect.

There are advantages to having the documentation built once and never changing for a given release, but there are advantages to having a single “ExDoc server” that can render documentation for arbitrary versions of arbitrary packages, too.

Has this server model been explored in public earlier? I haven’t found any references yet.

I am not really familiar with how ExDoc works and how easy/compatible would it be for a recent version of ExDoc to render docs for arbitrarily old packages – but does that sound plausible and worth investigating further?

In broad lines, I’m thinking a server that would be able to take a Hex package (or perhaps even a Git repo), generate documentation, cache it and serve that. Any updates to the server functionality and design would apply to all pages consistently.