Bazel DocGen (1/3): Make link expansion mechanism more powerful.

# Motivation

Linking from one part of the Blaze/Bazel (“Blazel”) documentation to another one is surprisingly difficult due to various distinctions (native code vs Starlark, Blaze vs Bazel, generated vs narrative documentation). As a result, we’ve implemented various hacks or simply tolerated broken links.

# Contributions

This CL addresses the problems by doubling down on dynamic link expansion:

- RuleLinkExpander can now be used to link to any file in the build encyclopedia (“BE”): While the `${link foo}` syntax was originally intended for linking to rule families, a previous version already contained a hack to link to some static documentation files. This CL super-charges RuleLinkExpander by allowing it to link to *any* BE file, based on an explicit link mapping that has to be defined in a JSON configuration file. As a result, it’s clearly visible which files diverge between Blaze and Bazel.
- Introduction of StarlarkDocExpander: This new class is a proxy for the improved RuleLinkExpander as well as StarlarkDocUtils.substituteVariables(). As a result, Starlark documentation can now easily link to pages in the BE.

# Why JSON?

JSON is a lightweight configuration format, and luckily both Bazel and Blaze already have a JSON parser (GSON) among their dependencies.

# Downsides

The Starlark DocGen code is a love letter to the `static` modifier, which unfortunately means that we have to pass the StarlarkDocExpander instance through many methods.

# Alternatives

We could have passed the StarlarkDocExpander instance to the Velocity Template engine, which would have allowed us to call the expand() method from within the templates. However, I think it’s easier to figure out what happens if the real logic happens inside Java.

PiperOrigin-RevId: 433039776
32 files changed
tree: ac19b910c513a4b48defab8a12d693bca2c40460
  1. .bazelci/
  2. .github/
  3. examples/
  4. scripts/
  5. site/
  6. src/
  7. third_party/
  8. tools/
  9. .bazelrc
  10. .gitattributes
  11. .gitignore
  12. AUTHORS
  13. BUILD
  14. CHANGELOG.md
  15. CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md
  16. CODEBASE.md
  17. CODEOWNERS
  18. combine_distfiles.py
  19. combine_distfiles_to_tar.sh
  20. compile.sh
  21. CONTRIBUTING.md
  22. CONTRIBUTORS
  23. distdir.bzl
  24. distdir_deps.bzl
  25. ISSUE_TEMPLATE.md
  26. LICENSE
  27. MODULE.bazel
  28. README.md
  29. SECURITY.md
  30. WORKSPACE
  31. WORKSPACE.bzlmod
README.md

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