kdevplatform API docs

Tomáš Trnka <[email protected]> Tue, 11 Nov 2025 10:32:06 +0100
Newsgroups gmane.comp.kde.devel.kdevelop
Message-ID <7199353.9J7NaK4W3v@electra>
Hi,

I'm making my first baby steps in KDevelop development, prototyping a new=20
language support plugin (Fortran, based on flang; for fun and profit :-)). =
As=20
a complete newcomer to the codebase, I feel that the whole DUChain world ha=
s=20
quite a learning curve and it take a while to figure out how things work.

The kdevplatform codebase is full of nice and helpful Doxygen comments, but=
 I=20
can't for the life of me build a browsable version (be it Doxygen HTML or=20
QtHelp or anything else) or find it anywhere. There are some dead links to=
=20
api.kde.org around on the internet, but that's about it.

So what do you people use as the source of kdevplatform API documentation?

I have so far relied on browsing the source directly and reading the commen=
ts=20
there, combined with a bit of reverse-engineering of the existing clang cpp=
=20
support to figure out how all the bits go together, but that gets kinda=20
tedious. A clickable hyperlinked version of the docs with inheritance diagr=
ams=20
and indices and everything would be so much more efficient.

There is a Doxyfile in the repo, but that doesn't build at all for me. Some=
=20
required files like doc/api/common/header.html were deleted quite a while a=
go:

commit 70a6358443530e13356e78f890a2403fa55ceeff (tag: v4.2.90)
Author: Milian Wolff <[email protected]>
Date:   Fri Feb 24 16:47:03 2012 +0100

    remove outdated documentation that is not built anyways and hence just=
=20
clutters out release tarballs

(Yes, I tried reverting that commit, but that just uncovers other missing=20
files.)

If the current state is that there's no browsable API docs at all and all w=
e=20
have are the comments, would it be welcome if I went and resurrected the=20
Doxygen build support, or are you fundamentally opposed to that?

By a weird coincidence, looks like I'm not even the only person looking for=
=20
the docs in this month:

https://discuss.kde.org/t/looking-for-kdevplatform-docs/41046

Best,

Tom=C3=A1=C5=A1