`cargo-fmt` and `cargo-clippy` are not documented in The Cargo Book

[WorikWork]

Problem

I am looking for documentation on cargo fmt

So I came to here

It is an undocumented Cargo command.

It seems like a good place to document it.

thank you

Proposed Solution

No response

Notes

No response

[epage]

Neither is cargo clippy. They aren't built in commands but extension that get installed when you install those rustup components.

[WorikWork]

Neither is cargo clippy. They aren't built in commands but extension that get installed when you install those rustup components.

Really? Ok.

I changed the title of the issue to reflect that.

I am raising this simply because this is where I came, and it seems a logical place to come (the Cargo Book) to find the documentation for the tools I use Cargo for.

[weihanglo]

We could technically put a link to each external command in new HTML pages. However there are things worth noting:

• None of them (cargo-fmt and cargo-clippy) has a man page like documentation in their repository (rust-lang/rustfmt and rust-lang/rust-clippy) for us to link to.
• The man page style docs are also accessible via cargo help <cmd> in your terminal emulator. We can't link to arbitrary format if their man pages are available. Those man pages are generated from the source here https://github.com/rust-lang/cargo/tree/master/src/doc.
• The Cargo team (maintainers of this repo) has no control over cargo-fmt and cargo-clippy in those repositories. The maintainers of those two repos can indeed write some man page docs in rust-lang/cargo repo, though it would be a burden to keep things sync in different repos.
• There are some discussion about moving cargo-fmt/cargo-clippy into Cargo as built-in commands, though it is not going to happen anytime sooner.

[weihanglo]

We might have a possible way forward at this moment:

Writing a static markdown for cargo fmt and cargo clippy only for HTML documentation at https://doc.rust-lang.org/cargo/. For each page, explain it is an external subcommand and is available via rustup component add. Also provide a link to https://doc.rust-lang.org/clippy/installation.html or https://github.com/rust-lang/rustfmt (sorry I cannot find the official doc for rustfmt under doc.rust-lang.org).