[pacman-dev] libalpm documentation
It seems that libalpm is heavily undocumented. I was wondering if anyone is currently working on doxygen comments? Glancing over the code it seems in a few places there are comments for functions, but they aren't doxygen comments. They may not have in depth detail about the function, or describe how to use that function, but they do have a description, and that's better than nothing. I think a library should be useable by looking at only the documentation. With more clients springing up since libalpm came out, I think documentation should be a high priority. For me, libalpm is currently completely confusing and I have no idea how the functions and structs, etc., come together, so unfortunately without a lot of reading I won't be able to contribute much to the documentation. It is also difficult to actually use libalpm without reading through the code. While searching for any information about this I did find the bug (#9237 [1]) on flyspray, as well as the thread "Libalpm direction and usage by others" [2], but that seemed a bit more about the design of the API. Having reading that thread I think it might be worth saying that I am planning on creating an Objective-C wrapper for libalpm, as well as a front-end in Objective-C/Cocoa for Mac OS X. I don't know how that will turn out and it's mostly an idea, so I don't want to make any empty promises. Good documentation would definitely help me to do that, but unfortunately the documentation is not that great. If I do stick with the project I will most likely be going through the code and, once I understand it, documenting it. I think that the documentation could get to a decent state if developers progressively commented the functions and structs, etc., while changing the code. Taking a minute or two to just write a brief description would be great. Other developers could also later take a few seconds to document the parameters, then someone else could write up the details, etc. I saw a patch set yesterday that refactored code and it had doxygen comments for the new functions, which was great. [1] http://bugs.archlinux.org/index.php?do=details&task_id=9237 [2] http://archlinux.org/pipermail/pacman-dev/2008-March/011517.html
Sorry, I don't know what I was looking at, but looking at the generated doxygen documentation now a lot of things _are_ documented. Too bad you can't delete emails. I'm going to shut my mouth and go read it now. Feel free to ignore the previous email.
Sorry, I don't know what I was looking at, but looking at the generated doxygen documentation now a lot of things _are_ documented. Too bad you can't delete emails. I'm going to shut my mouth and go read it now. Feel free to ignore the previous email.
No problem, I agree that our documentation is far from perfect. I always suggest looking into pacman (front-end) code, because it is quite simple and working implementation of our back-end. Bye ---------------------------------------------------- SZTE Egyetemi Könyvtár - http://www.bibl.u-szeged.hu This mail sent through IMP: http://horde.org/imp/
participants (2)
-
Nagy Gabor
-
Sebastian Nowicki