On Fri, 2008-07-18 at 13:23 +0100, Daniel James wrote:
2008/7/17 Doug Gregor <dgregor@osl.iu.edu>:
We're working on this so-called "modularization" of Boost as part of the Boost-CMake project. Eventually, every library will be contained within a single directory tree, and will describe its dependencies on other libraries.
Have you made any plans for the documentation? If boost is modularized, will the documentation in 'doc/html' be split back into separate libraries, or would we keep the generated documentation outside of the modules?
Right now, the generated documentation is going to live outside of the modules. The problem isn't on the CMake side---we can easily generate whatever commands we need to drive the BoostBook toolchain---but that BoostBook/DocBook doesn't really work well as a modular system. The problem is that, when generating the documentation separately, we don't get the inter-library links that we'd like. Moreover, the HTML files that the DocBook XSL generates aren't currently in a form that easily permits side-by-side installation of documentation for each library separately and, even if we did, we need to deal with the problem of generating a table of contents and/or index. So, while I'd like modular documentation generation, it's going to need some serious work on the BoostBook side that I'm not prepared to do. Of course, help would be appreciated :) On the plus side, we can generate Unix man pages in a modular fashion. I'd like to do this by default on Unix targets, because it's nice to be able to write, "man boost::function" and get at the reference documentation. - Doug