[Development] RFC: The Future of QDoc

[casper.vandonderen at nokia.com]

On 2/9/12 10:44 PM, "ext BRM" <bm_witness at yahoo.com> wrote:

>> From: "casper.vandonderen at nokia.com" <casper.vandonderen at nokia.com>
>
>>Just to add what I think to Marius' comments:
>>1. Doxygen would need some extra features, the major one being QML, but
>>also being able to use index files to easily link for instance the
>>Creator docs to the Qt docs.
>
>
>Why would Doxygen need QML itself? Or do you mean it would need to be
>able to process the QML/JavaScript files to get additional documentation?

I mean that Doxygen needs to support parsing .qml files and .cpp files
containing QML files (and that it should generate the same look of content
for both of them).

>>2. Even if we would use Doxygen we would still need a fork before a
>>release, I do not think we can line up releases of Doxygen with releases
>>of Qt.
>> And having a Doxygen version number like 1.7.6.2-qt-SHA1 also doesn't
>>look too great.
>
>
>I can understand bundling a version of Doxygen with Qt in the release -
>like many projects do for their dependencies in case those things are not
>on the platform people are building on. E.g. Subversion bundles libneon.
>However, I see no issue with saying that Doxygen version x.y.z is
>required to support documentation. So why would we need to _fork_ it as
>opposed to simply bundling a version that is known to work?

Doxygen does not support everything we need. Maybe at some point we (the
Qt project) will not require any new features from the documentation tool,
then we can obviously just ship a Doxygen version that is known to work.
What I mean is that in the beginning we'll probably have a situation
similar to Gerrit, where we have a version deployed with the Qt project
that is mainline with some extra patches applied (which is a fork in my
book, or at least temporarily, until the patches are integrated in
mainline).

That would not occur when Doxygen releases are lined up with Qt (or when
we get lucky and Doxygen releases a version before a Qt release which has
all our patches applied).

Casper