What is a .RDOC_OPTIONS file?
The .RDOC_OPTIONS file is a special kind of file used by people who create software using the Ruby programming language. Ruby is a popular language for making websites and other software applications. When developers write code, they often include documentation, which is like a guide or manual that explains how the code works. This is where the .RDOC_OPTIONS file comes in.
RDoc is a tool that helps Ruby developers create this documentation automatically. It looks at the Ruby code and generates a set of documents that make it easier for other developers to understand the code. The .RDOC_OPTIONS file contains settings that tell RDoc how to create these documents. For example, it can specify which comments in the code should be turned into documentation, what character set (like UTF-8) to use, which files should not be included in the documentation, and where to save the generated documents. This file is usually included when developers share their Ruby projects with others, often as part of a .GEM package, which is a way to distribute Ruby applications or libraries.
To open and edit a .RDOC_OPTIONS file, you can use RDoc itself, since it understands how to read and apply these settings. However, because it's essentially a text file, any text editor (like Notepad on Windows, TextEdit on Mac, or Gedit on Linux) can be used to open and change it. This means you don't need any special software to view or edit the file, making it accessible to anyone who needs to adjust the documentation settings for their Ruby project.
It's important to note that there are some options you shouldn't save in the .RDOC_OPTIONS file because they might cause RDoc to not work as expected. These options include things like the format of the documentation, whether to include a coverage report, the encoding of the documents, and several others that affect how RDoc runs. Developers need to be careful with these settings to ensure that their documentation is generated correctly.
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