Re: Discussion plans for today

[Libor Polčák]

Hello Ricardo,

sorry for the late reply. My comments are inline.

> 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.

Sure, this seems like a perfect moment to step back.

> 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.

Just to make sure, we have also comments not only for wrappers but also for 
other code like 
https://www.fit.vutbr.cz/~ipolcak/jsr/doxygen/html/alea_8js.html. But I guess 
that you mean all code, not just wrappers.

>  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.

AFAIU English comments are planned to be a part of the source code files. 
English markdown files will be created automatically. Translated texts will 
need to be written in Markdown and the translation needs to be revisited after 
every change in the English text in the comments in the code.

Do I understand correctly?

Thanks

Libor