Hello There!
As some of you know, I've implemented a toolkit, consisting of a code generator and a runtime I/O module to map the full Blender DNA to Java classes and allow reading and writing of files (cf. [1]). All that is fine but won't help a developer as long as he/she don't know the meaning of those generated classes and its member variables. Thus, they will need source code documentation, to be provided in the generated code. Since providing documentation to blender sources is not the right way, I came up with the idea to provide a documentation system, maintained separate from blender source. I picked that up in the Minecraft modder community, and thought it is a neat idea. There, it is basically a string table, which maps names of classes and their members to deobfuscated names (and the same for documentation, if I remember correct). I took that idea and made it a bit more flexible, and object oriented, added mechanisms such as merging and inheritance of documentation, combined it with a versioning system and took JSON as basic format. Then I've extracted available documentation from python API (thanks to Ton's advice) and source code using doxygen into my documentation system to fed it to my code generator. Both is not satisfying: Python API actually provides documentation of RNA, which is quite similar to DNA but still different, and the source code documentation is not addressed to API developers, since DNA is not intended to be available to them, I guess. Thus, I still have huge gaps in the documentation that have to be added manually, somehow, but I can't provide it on my own (I'm already way off track with this thing). To prevent wasting a lot of time of API developers by forcing everyone of them to read blender source code to figure out what they can actually do with the data, I'm planning to setup some kind of community-driven source code documentation system similar to a wiki, based on what I already have. My current idea is to just host the JSON files in a separate repository on github so everybody can easily share knowledge gained from studying blender source code by sending in pull requests [2]. When I mentioned that idea on a forum, someone pointed out, that others, e.g. the C language guys, might be interested in the documentation as well and I should discuss it with you for more elaborated input. Since this is a bit of a longer story, and even non-blender developers may want to throw in their thoughts, I decided to post it on the mailing list. So, what do you think about the idea? Are you interested to support it from your side or even contribute to it? Or do you rather want to host it yourself? The documentation could even be turned into wiki entries, if you want, since it is in machine readable format. Regards Holger Machens [1] http://homac.cakelab.org/projects/JavaBlend/ [2] https://help.github.com/articles/using-pull-requests/ _______________________________________________ Bf-committers mailing list Bf-committers@blender.org http://lists.blender.org/mailman/listinfo/bf-committers