x/tools/cmd/godoc: verbosity dial

[bradfitz]

I was joking to David that we should have a slider knob on godoc to choose how much crap in a package we show.

Imagine if a user loaded the net package and they only saw Dial and Listen and Conn by default, but then had to do something to show all the noise.

I'm kinda joking, but kinda not. Maybe there's something to do here.

We've tried to address this in the past with package docs and examples, which helps, but also just adds to the overall noise.

Low priority.

/cc @adg

[adg]

This does seem like a cool idea.

This might be a useful godoc.org thing. We could look at the most-used identifiers in a package and show them up front as a kind of "intro" view, then they could click below the fold to see the full story.

cc @alandonovan @shurcooL @shantuo

[dmitshur]

I've had similar ideas for a while now.

I completely agree something like this would be extremely helpful. When learning about a new package, the first thing I'm happy to see is a package summary that explains "how to get started". But of course it's only there if the package author is nice enough to provide it.

Implementation wise, I have no concrete ideas how to actually do this. But I'm always thinking about it in the background.

Just wanted to say 👍 to the idea and add my thoughts.

[minux]

For godoc.org, perhaps we can use statistics on the identifier use frequency, but for x/tools/cmd/godoc, I'm not sure if the standard packages are representative enough to extract generally useful statistics of usage.