Methods from anonymous types obscure godoc's output

[niemeyer]

We've recently added support for showing the methods of anonymous fields in godoc as
part of their outer type, but it seems that showing that information by default may
easily get more confusing than helpful when one of the underlying types has more than a
few methods:

   http://goneat.org/lp/lpad

It's a significant growth in the perception of the API surface, and the methods that
come from the anonymous field are not as relevant as the methods on the type itself, so
it's obscured considerably the interesting interface for each of the types.

[rsc]

Comment 1:

This does appear to be redundant: the embedded field
is an exported one, so it is already visible in the documentation.
I believe we should only be showing these additional
methods if they are reachable via _unexported_ fields,
in the same way that we don't show methods for embeddings
of exported types from other package.s

Labels changed: added priority-go1, removed priority-triage.

Status changed to Accepted.

[niemeyer]

Comment 2:

As a related detail, the embedded fields that come from anonymous types are lying about
whether the receiver is a pointer or not:
    http://tip.goneat.org/pkg/archive/zip/#Writer.Write

[niemeyer]

Comment 3:

Erm, s/embedded fields/methods/

[rsc]

Comment 4:

Actually, the documentation is correct.  The value zip.Writer
implements Write, because the value contains an embedded
*countWriter, and the receiver for countWriter's Write method
needs a pointer.
Russ

[niemeyer]

Comment 5:

Ah, I hadn't looked from that perspective. I guess it's just slightly confusing. When I
looked at the documentation, it surprised me that (w Writer) was the receiver. It felt
like a bug in the code.

[rsc]

Comment 6:

It may well be a bug in the code, one that we haven't noticed
because there was no direct visiblity into the exact method sets.
I noticed the same thing about your embedded *Value in the
example you sent in.  In many ways this is working as intended,
but I agree that it is too cluttered to keep as is.

[rsc]

Comment 7:

Labels changed: added go1-must.

[griesemer]

Comment 8:

This issue was closed by revision 3c6bebf.

Status changed to Fixed.