doxygen

[Allan Stokes]

Has anyone considered the possibility of generating browsable code
documentation using an automated documentation tool?

The tool I've seen mentioned most often for this purpose is Doxygen.
http://www.stack.nl/~dimitri/doxygen/

I did a quick check on the web to determine whether Doxygen can reasonably
cope with template libraries.  The bulk of the comments which came up on
this subject were in the libstdc++ thread (I saw a number of posts from Mark
on that list).

Some people there have recently discussed applying Doxygen to the gcc
iostreams library (or portions thereof).  If it can do a good job of
iostreams it can cope with most template constructs.  They seem to be moving
in the right direction.

I was thinking it might possible to set up the conceptual documentation to
hyperlink into an actual web-based source archive.  This browsable archive
could either be something like Doxygen or it could be a simple CVS web
interface.

Doxygen includes a mechanism for adding documentation directives into your
source code.  I wouldn't be surprised if Doxygen contained a feature whereby
we could mark each source file with tags indicating which concepts it was
associated with.  It might not be all that difficult to then use those tags
to automatically create links between the generated documentation and the
written documentation.  This is the kind of thing that DocBook is supposed
to facilitate.

Is there any interest in having me run the Pooma sources through Doxygen on
a trial basis to see what can be done along these lines?

Allan