Dead link finding automation

[Vladimir Panteleev via Digitalmars-d]

On Friday, 15 April 2016 at 18:25:58 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu 
wrote:
> Can we automate stuff like 
> https://issues.dlang.org/show_bug.cgi?id=15929? There are quite 
> a few tools around, not to mention we could easily roll our 
> own. Who'd like to take this project? Thx! -- Andrei

It's something I've been thinking about for a while.

This particular case is a DDox deficiency. The macros we use in 
our documentation are not meant for the URL structure that DDox 
uses. This incompatibility creates broken links. People have 
stepped up with PRs to replace them with better macros, which 
will work in DDox as well, so it's an area of active improvement.

chmgen reports broken internal links (for stuff that goes into 
the CHM, which is based on the DDoc Phobos documentation format, 
thus it wouldn't find the above broken DDox link). I've been 
planning into integrating it into the documentation tester, so 
that new broken internal links result in a test failure.

External links are a different issue. They can't be tested in the 
autotester (at least not fail the build), otherwise a site we 
link to going (temporarily) down means our master is broken. They 
would need special treatment, e.g. report them as some form of 
warnings but don't fail them.