x/pkgsite: exported variables should appear in the index and be anchored

[myitcv]

What is the URL of the page with the issue?

https://pkg.go.dev/github.com/frankban/quicktest@v1.11.2

What is your user agent?

Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_12_6) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/87.0.4280.67 Safari/537.36

Screenshot

See below

What did you do?

Related to #42652

• Visited https://pkg.go.dev/github.com/frankban/quicktest@v1.11.2
• Tried to find the IsNil variable (which I had to know existed in the first place)

What did you expect to see?

I expected to be able to:

• quickly and discover all variables exported by this package
• quickly and easily find the IsNil exported variable (in this case I knew it existed), read its documentation, and be able to link to its anchor for reference

What did you see instead?

• The variable not listed in the index
• No anchored heading for the variable
• The documentation buried in the documentation for the Checker type, with the IsNil documentation seemingly being a continuation of the IsFalse variable

To my mind there's a real discoverability problem here because IsNil and friends are exported precisely because they are intended to be used.

[rogpeppe]

FWIW it's for exactly this reason that we ended up having to duplicate all the variable doc comments into the package-level doc comment - the discoverability of the variables, a crucial part of this package's API, was poor enough that people complained that they were unable to find out how the package worked. This was with godoc.org, not with pkgsite, but the issue remains.

[dmitshur]

Issue #38575 seems to be related.

[willfaught]

Same issue for go doc, really. You can't do go doc os | grep ErrExist because it's not listed. You have to guess which var group it's in.