People are complaining about having to install a .gemrc to get sensible behavior. Making the file a few characters shorter doesn't make it less of a burden.
I google far more often than I ri.
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&source=hp&biw=101...
Personally, I can switch to a browser window, google for a gem, find its docs, and read them online in less time than it takes for ri to return its usually incomplete result or ask for brain-dead disambiguation. Ruby would have a better reputation if ri simply didn't exist.
I can't say I've ever used ri, although I do browse local rdoc, sometimes. I know plenty of developers that hadn't heard of "gem server" until I mentioned it. And this is completely discounting production environments, where the documentation is almost certainly a waste of deploy time.
It's an orthogonal problem, though. The main issue with doc generation is that it is really, really slow (compared to the rest of the install process). If it can be sped up – patches are surely welcome – it'll just leave the envs that flat-out don't need the docs, ever, and those can use the new --no-doc.
When did "+1" become a valid opinion?
The few people who attempted to actually discuss the patch were more than drowned out by -- well -- a bunch of propellerheads.
If everyone wrote a short paragraph on their agreement with the original idea it would be very hard to find the comments where people were either dissenting or had something original to say.
1.7 will replace --no-rdoc and --no-ri with a single --[no-]document option (which should be automatically aliased to --[no-]doc by optparse) making this easier to do.
Not quite the same, if that was what was meant, and calling people who express a valid opinion on this "propellerheads" just seems unnecessarily insulting. There are 200+ comments because people feel strongly about this and not because they are trolling.