DoxyGen Style Kernel API reference.

Brian Gianforcaro b.gianfo at gmail.com
Thu Sep 3 10:28:49 PDT 2009


I'm interested in setting up a Doxygen or Doxygen-like documentation reference for DragonFly-BSD. I have been very interested in working on DragonFly for a considerable amount of time. I've realized that for the most part I just have no idea how most of the code works or what underlying API's the kernel and userland use. I do realize a large amount of effort goes into writing and keeping man pages up to date, documenting these very things. However, I feel like having an on line resource to see 
for example, function call graph's and data structures explained might lower the barrier to entry for new developers. And possibly even help out the experienced dev's when they've forgotten how pieces of code works or interacts.

I imagine this documentation would be built nightly off of master. So developers always have the freshest doc's available.

I have noticed that Net/Open/FreeBSD don't have anything similar either. Would other developers be interested in such a resource? I certainly don't want to put my time and effort into something that would likely never be used.

Some examples of other projects doxygen documentation. 
    * D-Bus documentation http://freedesktop.org/software/dbus/doc/api/html/index.html
    * Visualization Toolkit http://www.vtk.org/doc/nightly/html/index.html
    * IBM's International Components for Unicode http://www.icu-project.org/apiref/icu4c/

If you could just let me know any of the pro's/con's you see and what your vote would be. Also if you have any specific requests for what you would like the automatically generated documentation to contain, I can put them on my todo list.

Thanks,
- Brian Gianforcaro





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