Host `--output-format json` files in addition to generated HTML

[deeprobin]

I need this to implement my own "doc"-frontend for me into a multi-page-application.

[syphar]

@deeprobin what kind of information would you need?

docs.rs is just hosting some metadata and is serving the HTML files generated by rustdoc,

[deeprobin]

Oh okay. Then it would be better if I open a issue in the rustdoc repository? I thought this was the right repository for this.

[Nemo157]

Rustdoc has an in-progress JSON backend: rust-lang/rust#76578

There has been some very brief discussion of docs.rs generating and hosting these files along with the html. But at the moment I think it's quite buggy (e.g. rust-lang/rust#80664 is probably going to fail a large proportion of builds) and the format is unstable. I think it would make sense to wait a little longer till it has stabilized a bit more before we add it here (I know of at least a couple of users that are already building alternative renderers based on the json, which will hopefully drive it towards stabilization).

[DottieDot]

Any progress/updates on this?

[syphar]

There are still open ICEs when generating the JSON (see this current discussion on zulip, rust-lang/rust#93518 is one of the fixes.

When this is solved I believe we have to partially finish #795 so we have the additional spare capacity for running the additional builds.

Of course on top of that the actual code change needs to be done.

[jyn514]

I don't think we should start hosting this until the JSON backend is stabilized. The output format is likely to change several more times before stabilization.

[syphar]

yeah, also valid point, I only had in mind that we could find more ICEs when running it for docs, but the format changing could be annoying for users of the JSON