Thoughts on documentation

Andy Wingo <[email protected]>
Newsgroups gmane.lisp.guile.gtk
Message-ID <[email protected]>
Hi all,

At FOSDEM this year, there was a suggestion, from the maintainer of the
haskell-gtk bindings iirc, that we use the devhelp documentation index
to automatically generate documentation for our wrapper libraries. This
seems to me to be a fine idea. Devhelp files (see e.g. on
debian /usr/share/doc/libgtk2.0-doc/gtk/gtk.devhelp2.gz) are basically
an index to a set of HTML documents. We can parse these with SSAX and
somehow fold the documentation into the files generated at compile-time,
perhaps translating the HTML subset that they use into the S-texinfo
representation that guile-lib defines. We can also perform certain
canonical transformations, e.g. gtk_bin_add -> gtk-bin-add, and use
information about arguments to transform e.g. gtk_icon_size_lookup(size,
*x, *y) to document the fact that it returns multiple values (as it
does).

We might need to hack the help system a bit so we can make all of this
information available at runtime without actually loading it all into
memory, but that is doable.

I just wanted to write because I had a brain wave, and wanted any
comments or ideas before implementing it :)

Cheers,

Andy.
-- 
http://wingolog.org/
lmpx.com only provides a reader for public news (NNTP) servers. It is not affiliated with the servers or forums shown here and is not responsible for the content of articles, which is written by their respective authors.