On Mon, Mar 15, 2021 at 8:47 PM Andrii Nakryiko <andrii.nakryiko@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > On Mon, Mar 15, 2021 at 9:51 AM Grant Seltzer Richman > <grantseltzer@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > > > Hi all, > > > > I have been experimenting with ways to contribute documentation to > > libbpf to make it easier for developers of bpf projects to use it. > > With the goal of making a documentation site that is easy to > > maintain/generate I found Doxygen (many of you may have experience > > with it, I did not). I set up a CI/CD workflow using github actions > > that runs doxygen on the libbpf mirror hosted there, and hosts the > > produced HTML using netlify. You can find the currently hosted version > > of it at https://libbpf-docs.netlify.app (I would gladly donate a real > > domain name for this purpose). The docs generation workflow is in my > > github repo here: https://github.com/grantseltzer/libbpf-docs > > Thanks for investigating this! I've look at libbpf-docs.netlify.app, > and it seems like it just contains a list of structs and their fields > (both those that are part of libbpf API, as well as internal). Out of > all functions only two are listed there (libbpf_nla_parse_nested and > libbpf_nla_parse) and both are not part of libbpf API as well. So I > understand that I don't see any comments due to the '/**' format > (though it would be easy to run sed script adding it everywhere, just > as part of an experiment), but I'm not sure why none of API functions > are present there? > > I think kernel docs used to be hosted on readthedocs.org, seems like > they are also providing hosting for open-source projects, so that > would solve the problem of the hosting. Have you looked at that > solution? It definitely has a bit more modern UI that > Doxygen-generated one :) but I don't know what are the real > differences between Sphinx and Doxygen and which one we should choose. > > > > > In order to make this work all we would need is to format comments > > above functions we want to document. Doxygen requires that the comment > > just be in a block that starts with `/**`. I don't think doxygen > > specific directives should be committed to code but I think this is a > > fine convention to follow. Other doxygen directives (i.e. having > > `@file` in every file) can be faked using a step I have in the github > > actions. > > > > What does everyone think? Can we agree on this convention and start > > contributing documentation in this way? Any pitfalls to doxygen I'm > > not familiar with? > > > > Thanks! As far as I understand Doxygen's only criteria for generating documentation for functions is if the correctly formatted comment is present. I've changed the repo that the libbpf-docs.netlify.app website uses to track a fork libbpf I have on my personal account. I added comments above some ringbuffer functions to demonstrate this. Interestingly the two functions that already show up (libbpf_nla_parse/parse_nested) have comments which are specifically formatted for doxygen, even including directives for arguments and related functions. I have heard of Sphinx/read-the-docs but didn't look too deeply into it, I'll check it out and report back with my findings!
