[Swig-devel] An introduction and explanation of intentions re the Doxygen GSOC branch

[Jamie K. <jk...@ki...>]

Hello all

I've been asked by the guys in the #swig-gsoc irc chat room to take the time
to introduce myself since I've recently got involved with a SWIG enhancement
and have just been granted commit access to get this thing done.

Some of you probably know that there was a Google SOC project to add Doxygen
comment parsing and translation to other documentation syntaxes so that
inline documentation can be added to the code generated by SWIG.  This
project was undertaken by Cheryl Foil on the GSOC basis, but she has since
dropped off the radar a little (Cheryl if you are out there get in touch!).
Anyway, I've taken her branch and had a look at what she has done with the
aim of getting PyDoc and TCLDoc support implemented in the next week or so.
This is a requirement for a project I'm working on in my day-job: we have
two SWIG based bridges (TCL and Python) but no documentation for them.  It's
becoming imperative that we remedy this ASAP since customers are unable to
use these layers with a complete lack of documentation.

Luckily I have found that Cheryl has laid a decent enough foundation, though
there has already had to be some fairly heavy refactoring to allow for
unforseen cases (not an issue in JavaDoc so they didn't show until now).
Anyway, I'm ploughing on with this work now and hope to have the basics in
place by next week, enough so that I can solve my problems.  Now that I have
commit access I will aim to improve this as much as possible over time so
that it is feature complete but I see this as being a longer term goal.
Right now I want to get Python and TCL to the stage where we can at least
get something useable out of them, even if all Doxygen tags are not
processed in the most complete manner.

Anyway, I hope that gives you some idea about my intentions.  If anyone
would like to lend a hand, or has any particularly strong requirements,
please feel free to start a new thread to discuss them.

-- 
Jamie Kirkpatrick
07818 422311