[Ksummit-discuss] [CORE-TOPIC] Documentation
Jonathan Corbet
corbet at lwn.net
Tue Jul 14 02:36:47 UTC 2015
On Mon, 13 Jul 2015 21:46:46 +0200
Peter Hüwe <PeterHuewe at gmx.de> wrote:
> > kerneldoc does work, after a fashion. It works well enough that people
> > use it, and I hear about it quickly when somebody's comment change breaks
> > the docs build. I don't think we can remove it in the absence of
> > something better.
> Jonathan, do you keep an up-to-date copy of the generated files somewhere?
> (I cannot get it to work out of the box on my machine)
I don't, sorry. That would probably be a good thing for me to do for a
number of reasons.
> > Creating "something better" is actually on my list of things to do. The
> > only problem is that I've had to buy a second 4TB drive to hold that list,
> > so I don't know when I'll have time to think about it.
> Where do you think are the major issues from your point of view?
Well, as mentioned before, kerneldoc is fragile. A little while back
somebody changed a struct to a union without updating the comments to
match; that was enough to break the entire document build process. That
kind of thing happens a lot; I don't think it should have to be that way.
Beyond that, DocBook is a major pain. I get a fair number of patches
along the lines of "that </para> should really have been ahead of that
</whatever>". It's verbose, intimidating to newcomers, and causes more
worn-out shift keys than anything else. We don't need something with the
complexity of DocBook; something closer to Markdown or ReST would do us
just fine and make the documentation much more accessible.
But making any such change is a big job, and convincing the community to
go with a change in tooling is probably a bigger job. So I'm not rushing
into it.
> Would doxygen be "something better"? The kernel-doc style looks already quite
> similar.
> Maybe the kernel should not reinvent everything :)
Doxygen may be worth a look. I'm personally fond of Sphinx, though I
still haven't done a big project in it.
But this is all just dreaming until somebody has the time to do a major
docs overhaul and sell it to everybody else. Until then, I'm focused on
slowly improving what we have now...
jon
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