On 14-05-29 11:58 AM, Thomas Martitz wrote:
Am 26.05.2014 01:50, schrieb Matthew Brush:
Hi,
As part of working on cleaning up the exposed API to plugins I got to
thinking about where our comments are located. While it's nice to keep
the API-documentation-comments right at the definitions of the
functions in their respective .c source files, since we only install
the headers as a public reference (not even the plugin API docs IIUC),
should we not move the API-documentation-comments, that we already
diligently ensure exist and are fairly complete, into the headers
where they are accessible to plugin developers?
If we moved to having public headers that just included actual public
symbols, I think it would be advantageous to have those headers
totally commented/documented rather than requiring the user to
download Geany's source code and cross-reference functions in it to
access the comments/docs, or getting hold of the generated Doxygen API
documentation.
Does anyone feel really strongly about this?
Hello,
I can't say I feel overly strong but my experience is that when
implementation and comments are split that they begin to drift apart
sooner or later. I suggest keeping things as they are unless there is a
compelling technical advantage. We do a half decent job at documentation
(which is better than 90% of other FOSS projects) and we should not risk
that.
I agree somewhat, but it's actually not very hard to open the related
header and check when changing the code, especially since often changing
the API documentation means adding a new function, or changing the
semantics/signatures of a function, or adding/changing a structure/type,
which all requires editing the header anyway, so it's actually not
really much extra work.
As far as technical advantage, it causes less misleading comments in the
source (eg. documenting `@file foo.h` in the foo.c source file), avoids
users having to get a copy of the Doxygen docs for the correct version,
and finally to keep all the public API comments in the same public
header file, instead of the current way where types (structs, typedefs,
etc.) are necessarily documented in the header, but functions are
documented in the internal non-installed source files.
The reference documentation is the doxygen generated html/pdf/etc. It is
in many ways superior to headers+comments. The API is available online,
and we could also install it on make install, so that plugin authors are
not required to download anything.
Not everything is actually documented in Doxygen though, so one often
needs to reference the headers anyway, plus the online docs are for the
latest release and not the development version of Geany (AFAIK), and
additionally, installing the docs on make install (unconditionally)
would mean we require the user to have at least Doxygen (plus Qt and all
the stuff it requires) installed. But I agree we should (also) make the
API docs installable and maybe for packagers to make them part of the
-dev package for Geany if they wanted to.
Cheers,
Matthew Brush
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