Self-Documenting

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Looks like we’re back in business after a second period of downtime. I was pleasantly surprised to find people actively seeking out alternative download locations for my projects — while the server downtime was unfortunate, I’m motivated knowing people are interested in what I’m working on.

I’ve completed an initial implementation of my Still Image Host demo, for the next library release. Unfortunately my camera doesn’t seem to implement many interesting PIMA commands, so instead I’ve left much of the functionality up to the end-user, with the demo only displaying data extracted from the device info dataset, and opening/closing sessions with the attached camera. The API for sending and receiving PIMA commands (the standard for remote camera manipulation) in the demo is defined, so it should be simple to issue and process any additional desired commands.

I’ve been musing over adding in some automated documentation to the project, via a project like DoxyGen or similar. The advantage would be automatic, always correct documentation - a huge plus. The disadvantage would be all the massive comment blocks needed for every library component (define, typedef, etc.). Right now I think an alternative to a manual wiki is needed, but can’t think of an appropriate solution, so feel free to suggest one.

2 Responses to “Self-Documenting”

  1. Donald Delmar Davis Says:

    Dean,

    I think the documentation is the Achilles heal of this project and so let me be th first to laud your efforts here.

    I like this approach for two reasons:

    1) If the documentation were complete and accurate a body wouldn’t wind up getting anywhere near the underlying source which could therefore be as ungainly as you liked.

    2) As some who has found several needles by digging through the haystack that is your library I would also add that the internal documentation also use a little beefing up.

    OTOH If I find myself looking at yet another site full of unpopulated doxygen tabs you will find yourself on my explicative deleted list just under Lincoln Stein. And I will find myself using the Atmel code as a point of reference

    There is my 50 phennigs…

  2. geckosenator Says:

    check out texinfo, if you write your documentation in that format, you can convert it to pdf, html, tex and many others.

    I don’t really like generating the documentation from the source code because it adds so many ugly comments, and makes it harder to read the code when that’s what you want to do. Also good luck making doxygen understand your macros.

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