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/