Subject: Re: [PATCH] document string_list_clear

From: Jeff King <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 10 Dec 2014 03:52:01 -0500

On Tue, Dec 09, 2014 at 03:18:28PM -0800, Junio C Hamano wrote:

> Jonathan Nieder <[email-masked]> writes:
> 
> > Jeff King wrote:
> >
> >> Elsewhere I mentioned a tool to extract comments and format them. But do
> >> people actually care about the formatting step?
> >
> > If formatting means "convert to a straightforward text document that I
> > can read through", then I do.
> 
> If the result becomes unparsable by AsciiDoc(or), those who
> AsciiDoc'ified the api-*.txt may feel unhappy.  I however strongly
> suspect that the primary consumer of these api-*.txt documents are
> consuming the text version, not AsciiDoc-to-html output.

Yeah, that was my point. They were not even asciidoc'd for a long time,
then one contributor, who does not otherwise work on the code,
volunteered to asciidoc them. AFAIK there are no regular developers who
wanted this feature (but I do not know for sure, which is why I asked).

I do not _mind_ if they can be asciidoc'd, but if nobody does so, they
are bound to develop formatting errors. And matching asciidoc syntax
does come at a readability cost to the text.

> The documentation that was written with an explicit purpose to serve
> as documentation would explain how each pieces fit in the whole
> system much better than a list of pieces extracted from per-function
> comments, unless the header comment that serves as the source of
> generated document is written carefully.

If we split the header files sanely (i.e., to match what would be one
api-* file), then I had imagined each header file having a long
free-form comment at the top giving the overview, followed by commented
structures and functions, with possibly other free-form comments in the
middle as necessary. That's what I did for the strbuf.h conversion I
just sent.

> I am a bit hesitant to see us spending extra cycles either to
> reinvent doxygen (if we do our own) or working around quirks in
> third-party tools (if we decide to use existing ones).

Me too. That's what I hoped that we could come up with a form whose
in-header source is readable enough that people would use it. Then there
is really no tool necessary.

-Peff