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Re: Doxygen documentation


From: Stefan Bidi
Subject: Re: Doxygen documentation
Date: Tue, 20 Sep 2011 07:41:24 -0500

On Tue, Sep 20, 2011 at 4:20 AM, Richard Frith-Macdonald <richard@tiptree.demon.co.uk> wrote:

On 20 Sep 2011, at 09:58, David Chisnall wrote:

> Unfortunately, the output from doxygen is pretty horrible for Objective-C.
>
> You might like to take a look at the DocGenerator that Quentin wrote, in Étoilé svn.  It uses simpler markup and produces much nicer output.

But the point of using doxygen is that it's supposed to be an improvement ... if it's really 'horrible' then we should stick with autogsdoc and just tweak the output to look like whatever we want.
A big part of the point of having autogsdoc was to avoid any external dependencies so any gnustep code could guarantee it was always available to generate documentation ... if we lose that advantage then we want a big corresponding advantage somewhere else to compensate.  Now if most people are familiar with doxygen and it's easy to use and produces great output, then that familiarity/ease of use could be the compensating advantage, but if it's complicated and 'horrible' then why bother?

I just recently started playing around with it, so I'm not familiar with all the advantages/disadvantages of using doxygen over something else.  Having used both doxygen and autogsdox, doxygen does seem a whole lot more powerful than autogsdoc.  It includes conditional documentation with @if, @endif, etc; equation generation (not really useful to gnustep right now, but it does open a few doors to us math-types); and class hierarchy graphs.  There is a lot of functionality we will probably never use which may be seen as complicated/bloated, though.

I also found out I had to get 100+MB of packages because Debian "recommends" dogygen-latex, which brings in the whole latex runtime with it.  If that's not included, doxygen is quite light and I don't see the dependency as a drawback.

I can't comment on the objective-c output since I only tried with -corebase.  However, the output can be customized and new directives created using aliases.  I'm not sure how much work that would take, though.  I'll take a look at DocGenerator, tonight.

Stef

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