Chapel: Feature Request: Add section on chapel-lang.org/docs/ for Mason packages and generate page each package

[LouisJenkinsCS]

I was wondering if Chapel's website could have a specific section for Mason packages? As in, maybe it could contain a title, brief summary, and link to repository's documentation and source code, as well as a way to install it. For my example, I will use my Distributed Data Structures project I did for my Google Summer of Code. However in summary, I believe that this information can be generated from metadata provided with the project, I.E the TOML file...

Package Title

Package Summary

Repository: Repository Link
Documentation: Documentation Link

Install this package with mason:

mason install [Package Name]

Build and run package's examples:

mason build --example [Package Examples]
mason run --example [Package Examples]

Which in action, could look like the below...

Distributed Data Structures

Built-in data structures are a necessity for any budding language, and in a language where distributed computing is at its core, data structures that can properly be maintained across clusters is desired.
For my project, I have designed the core framework for a distributed data structures library, and have implemented two novel scalable distributed data structures, an ordered deque and an unordered multiset, that exceed a naive implementation by at least two orders of magnitude in a moderately sized cluster.

Repository: goo.gl/Z4YrsP
Documentation: goo.gl/fBjBH4

Install this package with mason:

mason install distributed-data-structures

Build and run package's examples:

mason build --example distributed-data-structures
mason run --example distributed-data-structures

[Spartee]

Thank you for submitting this issue! I think this is a crucial step to make more packages visible to our users. This documentation request has been considered. We were thinking about something like this

Ideally this is auto-generated, but if the first couple renditions are by hand thats fine. I am going to make a lot of documentation for the new mason features later in august so look for this then.

[LouisJenkinsCS]

Cool @Spartee, can't wait!

[ben-albrecht]

I propose that we make this section of the docs separable and built only when opting in explicitly, so that users building the docs locally don't need to access github in order to build docs.

e.g.

To build with the mason packages included in the documentation, which requires additional dependencies, use the following command:

CHPL_DOC_PACKAGES=true make docs

We'd want to keep this option on for some of nightly testing, especially the web documentation publishing job.

[ben-albrecht]

@Spartee - While progress has been made with the new script in #10795 (thanks for pushing on this), I think we ought to leave this issue open (or a new specific issue) until we actually have packages in the registry listed online somewhere.

[ben-albrecht]

I'm going to reopen for now, but we can close if/when we create a more specific issue about getting the existing script output into the online documentation.

[mppf]

I don't think we'll ever actually prioritize this if it's in Needs Review, so I'm moving it back to New Issues.