[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: >>We also need it for documentation. Its quite common for people to ask >>'what property do I set to do....' because there are so many >>undocumented properties. If there was a metadata file that described >>plugin properties, it could be used to generate the xdocs. > > There is one. It's called plugin.properties, and it can be used to > generate the xdocs :-)
We could probably make a contract that the comment block directly above the property contains it's description, but I'm not sure if this is what we really want? Generating an xdoc from the property files itself has an advantage of "on the spot" documentation, just like JavaDoc - you can read it in the Java source, but also in the generated HTML pages. We also don't have two files that need to be kept in sync (humans *always* forget...) We could go the other way around, and generated plugin.properties files from the metadata, to lift the need for synchronizing files. Descriptions in the metadata file could be emmited into the file as well. The metadata file would be xml (seems natural to me), so we could have a schema for it and take advantage of validation. On the other hand, should we really introduce a new format for specifying properties? Given the choice I'd probably stay with .properties files only, and write the PropertyDoc thingy. > The reason the documentation is lacking is noone has been willing to > do it. True. No matter which way we go - metadata files, or "PropertiesDoc" plugin maintainers will have to fill in the descriptions anyway... R. --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
