Following the lead of many Rust projects, I thought it would be nice if we adopted mdBook for the documentation and started generating most of the documentation automatically. The existing documentation was lacking in content, so I removed it (including manpage generation, but we can get that back later via mdBook).

The automatic generation is a bit strange, because we need to extract information from clap. So I've added a binary called uudoc which uses the same list of utils as the coreutils and writes HTML files to a docs/src/utils directory (which is in .gitignore). It's far from perfect, but it works surprisingly well already.

To generate the docs, you therefore need 2 commands:

cargo run --bin uudoc --all-features
cd docs
mdbook build

I've also written initial versions of an introduction and a page for the multi-call binary. The CONTRIBUTING.md file is also included. The layout is based on how The Cargo Book presents their options and flags.

To create the initial structure for the book, I used a little python script, which I've included here, so that we can refer to it later, but it isn't strictly necessary anymore.

A temporary hosted version can be found here: https://tertsdiepraam.github.io/uutils-docs/ (until we set it up in the CI)

Edit: Text above is updated to reflect the latest version.