Re: [jamboost] Bugs/Moratorium

From: Rene Rivera (grafik666_at_[hidden])
Date: 2002-03-26 23:32:49

On 2002-03-26 at 10:54 PM, david.abrahams_at_[hidden] (David Abrahams) wrote:

>
>----- Original Message -----
>From: "Rene Rivera" <grafik666_at_[hidden]>
>
>> I'm all for having the system include "online" help, hooray :-) And my
>> previous mention of in-code documentation seems like something we can
>do to
>> provide that. A model we can look at is the Perl doc system. It has
>the same
>> problems as we have, incremental, and highly modular code. And it
>manages to
>> provide documentation for all of it.
>
>I don't know that jam is as amenable to this sort of thing, though...
>hmm, HDRRULE, anyone? Maybe there is a way to extract doc from comments
>after all. Hmm, doctest anyone? Now I'm starting to scare myself...

Ahh, scary, yes. But it doesn't have be written in Jam.

>> So maybe a few rules that provide documentation in the form of long,
>short,
>> and brief. We can tie this either to modules or rule, or both. And
>then it
>> becomes possible to provide the "bjam --help-<module/rule-name>"
>> functionality.
>
>Well, let's be sure to pick something reasonably achievable, please, or
>nobody will write docs OR code! This sounds like a bit more of a
>challenge than I'd be ready to take on...

Doesn't sound like all that difficult to me, more famous last words :-]

For example:

module X
{
doc "brief description" : "short doescription" : "long description" ;
...
}

Could translate to:

module X
{
module local doc-brief = "brief description" ;
module local doc-short = "short description" ;
module local doc-long = "long description" ;
}

And when "bjam --help-X" is invoked. We see the --help and parse the module
name out, load it, ECHO the docs, and EXIT.

If there's a generic "--help" we can load all the know modules, would require
a master list, and ECHO hopefully formated info.

-- grafik - Don't Assume Anything
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