Re: [boost] [1.36.0] Libraries with unmerged changes?

From: Douglas Gregor (dgregor_at_[hidden])
Date: 2008-07-18 08:42:37

On Fri, 2008-07-18 at 13:23 +0100, Daniel James wrote:
> 2008/7/17 Doug Gregor <dgregor_at_[hidden]>:
> >
> > 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