Re: [boost] Why is the boost documentation so bad?

Subject: Re: [boost] Why is the boost documentation so bad?
From: Florian Lindner (mailinglists_at_[hidden])
Date: 2017-09-08 02:27:22

Another example which just occured to me:

http://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_65_1/libs/ptr_container/doc/ptr_inserter.html tells me how to copy elements, but I got
to grep the source code to find out I need to include #include <boost/ptr_container/ptr_inserter.hpp> to get the
back_inserter. Documentation was not helpful there.

Am 08.09.2017 um 10:21 schrieb Florian Lindner:
> Hello,
> 
> I really love to use boost libraries in my project, but I always wonder, for such an accomplished project, why is the
> documentation so bad?
> 
> A few examples:
> 
> I want to get familiar with http://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_65_1/libs/ptr_container/. What do I need to include? Neiter
> the tutorial, the reference or the usage guidelines mention a #include line. This is something which stroke me quite
> often at various boost libs.
> 
> Also with the ptr_container lib, I want to find the refrence for the ptr_vector::insert function. I got to scan the
> reference pages of all members of it's class hierarchy to find the insert() function (it's in ptr_sequence_adapter).
> 
> References and example code often have no syntax highlightning and no linking and it's extremely hard to find
> documentation for a specific symbol, or from there, to jump to the source code.
> 
> I would really like to have a more uniform and a documentation that not feels like a annotated source code dump.
> 
> I use doxygen for my own projects and I know it can generate nicely looking, with syntax highlightning and linked
> documentation.
> 
> Please, don't take this offensive, it's just some feedback I wanted to give a long time.
> 
> Best,
> Florian
>