[RFC wayland] doc: generate doxygen html output from the scanner

[Pekka Paalanen]

On Thu, 29 Oct 2015 11:48:01 +1000
Peter Hutterer <peter.hutterer at who-t.net> wrote:

> This switches the scanner to generate doxygen-compatible tags for the
> generated protocol headers, and hooks up the doxygen build to generate server
> and client-side API documentation.
> 
> For the wayland protocol, this generates a mainpage with the copyright
> information, all interfaces are separated by doxygen groups and thus listed in
> "Modules" in the generated output.
> 
> Function, struct and #defines are documented in doxygen style and associated
> with the matching interface.
> ---
> This is an RFC for now, we need to agree on whether we want to switch to
> doxygen style first. Other changes still missing here are:
> * afaict, the summary can be dropped for most entries, it doesn't seem
>   to add any value if a long description is there
> * currently parsing too many header files, we should only parse the protocol
>   ones for a cleaner documentation.
> * future work for wayland-protocols is to add the various protocols at the
>   @page level
> * a couple of things don't have the doxygen tag yet (mostly #defines)
> 
>  doc/doxygen/Makefile.am        |  22 +++++-
>  doc/doxygen/wayland.doxygen.in |   4 +-
>  src/scanner.c                  | 165 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++---------------
>  3 files changed, 130 insertions(+), 61 deletions(-)

Hi Peter,

this is a cool idea. I still haven't grasped all the details, but I
think we could use the following sets of "appendices" to the Wayland
documentation (prose):

A. language-agnostic protocols docs
B. libwayland library API docs, server and client separated
C. protocol C bindings docs, server and client separated

A and B are what we already have in some form, and C is what you are
now adding. Excellent!

A is generated directly from XML, and intended for people working on
other language bindings than our C bindings (when we get part C for
people working in C).

B is generated through Doxygen scanning non-generated code. It is
useful to keep the C bindings docs out of this, so that people writing
other language bindings have a coherent doc and they don't need to
check whether a function listed is something they are supposed to use
or not (i.e. generated or not).

A and C contain basically the same information, just laid out
differently: C talks in the proper C function and type names, while A
uses just the protocol names. C is further duplicated between server
and client docs.

I'm not sure if we need server:B+C and client:B+C docs as such, since I
don't think there are many references between B and C. It might be
enough to have one TOC page for "server" and one for "client" which
then somehow link to B and C parts.

Anyway, that's just random thoughts.

What I would really like is a way to have links to A, B (and C) from the
*prose*. Looks like we can already have links to A at least.

What bothers me in the current B from a user point of view is that I
don't know how to get a link to a specific function's documentation. I
don't think there is a TOC listing all functions, and when I find the
function I'm looking for, I can't take a link to it for e.g. pasting in
IRC. Doxygen docs themselves have all the links and TOCs, but the
conversion to docbook loses too much currently.

Ah, I hope I gave some ideas. Interesting work!

When you say "whether we want to switch to doxygen style", do you mean
that we'd drop the conversion to docbook? Would we be working towards
completely replacing docbook with only doxygen?

I applied this patch and tried to build it, but it seems it generates
object destructor functions twice, e.g. wl_buffer_destroy, so the build
fails.


Thanks,
pq
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