Jonathan Sachs - 2016-01-19

Several of our doxygen projects contain markdown files. In some cases (not all), doxygen incorporates the absolute pathname of a markdown file into the filename of the generated HTML and XML files. For example, if a project's INPUT list includes a file with this pathname:

C:\Users\jsmith\x\y\z\examplefile.md

...it may generate XML and HTML files named:

md_C_1_Users_jsmith_x_y_z_examplefile.html
md_C_1_Users_jsmith_x_y_z_examplefile.xml

I understand why doxygen does this: it has to generate distinct names for markdown files that have the same filename but live in different directories. But the scheme raises a couple of problems.

First, it incorporates confidential information into a potentially public file. The users of my documents have no business knowing my username or how my disk is organized.

Second, it blows a project I'm working on out of the water. The project is a program that identifies differences between two versions of a project by comparing the XML files. If the two versions happen to be built by different writers, the generated XML files will all have different names, making comparison impossible! If the files above were generated by user rjones, for example, their names would become:

md_C_1_Users_rjones_x_y_z_examplefile.html
md_C_1_Users_rjones_x_y_z_examplefile.xml

I could "solve" this problem by writing a script that renames all of the XML files, but that's an incredibly ugly solution. A good solution would be to make doxygen generate the same filenames for the same files, no matter who happens to be building them. Is there a way to do that?