Discussion plans for today

[Ricardo Lafuente]

Hi all,

We've been twisting Doxygen in creative ways to accomodate the site needs, but got to a point where we're looking at the current situation and could use your feedback regarding how to move forward and finish things. With Doxygen, we're hitting some clear limitations:

• Translation support will be hacky and difficult, since Doxygen works from code comments; gettext has no easy way to support translation of comments.
• Doxygen templating is experimental and mostly undocumented. We've been running into strange bugs and coming up with even stranger workarounds
  
• Ẁhile setting up the static blog using Pelican, we will also have to visually pretend that it's one site instead of two (Doxygen for docs and Pelican for posts). Doable but not as easy to manage and maintain.
  

We were taking a step back to look at this and trying to understand if all the hacks are worth it. 

The main reason that we have been sticking with Doxygen has been to easily extract the wrapper descriptions from the source code. So far, we haven't been using the Doxygen function reference + automatic function listing.

So we would ask you about the possibility of making the main site in Pelican, with any necessary technical documentation additions handled by Doxygen whenever needed. Here's a possible plan:

1. Create a script to extract the wrapper descriptions from the comments, and save them into Markdown files for Pelican.
2. These Markdown files can be easily translated using Weblate or another framework that we decide upon.
3. If any special page or resource from Doxygen is needed, we can generate it separately with Doxygen and copy over the relevant files to the Pelican site output.
   

From your side, not much changes: you can still edit the wrapper descriptions inside the source files, and they're automatically converted to Markdown files for Pelican when generating the site and blog. On the other hand, if we are not okay with the fact that there's two "single sources of truth" (description in source code + description in markdown file), we can evaluate in the meeting whether we can come up with a suitable workflow that saves time for everybody.

We hope this wasn't too confusing! Let us know if you need any clarification here, otherwise let's have this discussion later today.

Cheers,
a&r