Anchor names for some impls are not predictable

[nwalfield]

I have a struct with a generic type:

struct ComponentBundle<C> {
    component: C,
    ...
}

Then I have implementations for different concrete types, e.g.,:

impl ComponentBundle<UserID> {
    ...
}

I want to link to the documentation for one of those implementations. But their anchors are called "#method.revocation_status-1", "#method.revocation_status-2", etc., which is brittle. It would be nice if the anchor names were more predictable.

[kinnison]

cc @rust-lang/rustdoc

[nwalfield]

As a workaround, I added <a name="userid_revocation_status"></a> to the right method's documentation and link to that. That links to the right documentation, but the link is in the documentation, not the method's signature. Also, the method isn't highlighted, which is unfortunate.

[teythoon]

Similar, if you have multiple impl blocks for a type, their anchors are called impl, impl-1, ... which is also unpredictable.

[jyn514]

IMO the links rustdoc generates are not and should not be stable. The fix is to use intra-doc links (#43466), which unfortunately are not yet stable (but should be stabilized in the next release: #74430). But I don't think we should change the anchors to be predictable, people shouldn't be depending on them in the first place.

[kinnison]

@jyn514 hard to do that across crates.

[GuillaumeGomez]

If it's a crate that is not one of your dependencies, it's not possible, indeed.

[jyn514]

If it's a crate that is not one of your dependencies, it's not possible, indeed.

If it's not one of your dependencies (and in particular not your crate), then you can't depend on the anchor being present, you have to first navigate to it and be sure it's there before hard-coding it. So I don't think that's an argument to make the anchor predictable, just that doc authors should verify their links are present.

[GuillaumeGomez]

I personally think that the generated HTML shouldn't be generated, I was just stating a fact. ;)

[kinnison]

Another difficulty is linking usefully to docs from (for example) an mdbook.

[jsha]

FYI some of this is being updated in #92745 and #91759.