Pub searches should include corelibs

[mit-mit]

New developers will not know if any given Dart library they are looking for is considered a core library included with the Dart SDK, or a package on pub. For example, if you need JSON parsing, is that a corelib or package?

To help with this, we propose searches on Pub also return results for corelibs.

This bug tracks a short-term solution where the searches only are based on the main Dartdoc comment (e.g. dart:convert dartdoc).

A separate bug tracks a longer term fix to search the whole API surface.

[kevmoo]

@mit-mit – punting to next release

[filiph]

For the record, I think this is an important issue from the user journey perspective. We don't want the Dart ecosystem to be reinventing .groupBy, .padLeft, .reversed, UnmodifiableListView, Point or even Stream or Future/Promise. Many users are coming from ecosystems where these things are expected to be outside the core libraries.

[kevmoo]

Absolutely agree.

[mit-mit]

Dartdoc search is now tracked in #1179

[isoos]

Did some experimenting, and the current pkg/pub_dartdoc is able to output the pub-data.json the same way we are doing for normal packages. However: it takes about 4 minutes to do that, and we need to split the indexing at least by libraries, and probably store the cached values alongside the current search snapshot.

[isoos]

This is now deployed, ranking issues should be filed separately.