Re: [PATCH 0/3] Use Doxygen and sphinx for html documentation

From: Stefano Stabellini <sstabellini@kernel.org>
To: Andrew Cooper <andrew.cooper3@citrix.com>
Cc: Luca Fancellu <luca.fancellu@arm.com>,
	xen-devel@lists.xenproject.org,  bertrand.marquis@arm.com,
	wei.chen@arm.com,  George Dunlap <george.dunlap@citrix.com>,
	Ian Jackson <iwj@xenproject.org>,
	 Jan Beulich <jbeulich@suse.com>, Julien Grall <julien@xen.org>,
	 Stefano Stabellini <sstabellini@kernel.org>,
	Wei Liu <wl@xen.org>
Subject: Re: [PATCH 0/3] Use Doxygen and sphinx for html documentation
Date: Tue, 6 Apr 2021 14:24:51 -0700 (PDT)	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <alpine.DEB.2.21.2104061418360.31460@sstabellini-ThinkPad-T480s> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <225d7e0a-c5c6-a954-9141-ba1d859f400a@citrix.com>

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On Tue, 6 Apr 2021, Andrew Cooper wrote:
> On 06/04/2021 11:36, Luca Fancellu wrote:
> > This serie introduce doxygen in the sphinx html docs generation.
> > One benefit is to keep most of the documentation in the source
> > files of xen so that it's more maintainable, on the other hand
> > there are some limitation of doxygen that must be addressed
> > modifying the current codebase (for example doxygen can't parse
> > anonymous structure/union).
> >
> > To reproduce the documentation xen must be compiled because
> > most of the headers are generated on compilation time from
> > the makefiles.
> >
> > Here follows the steps to generate the sphinx html docs, some
> > package may be required on your machine, everything is suggested
> > by the autoconf script.
> > Here I'm building the arm64 docs (the only introduced for now by
> > this serie):
> >
> > ./configure
> > make -C xen XEN_TARGET_ARCH="arm64" CROSS_COMPILE="aarch64-linux-gnu-" menuconfig
> > make -C xen XEN_TARGET_ARCH="arm64" CROSS_COMPILE="aarch64-linux-gnu-"
> > make -C docs XEN_TARGET_ARCH="arm64" sphinx-html
> >
> > now in docs/sphinx/html/ we have the generated docs starting
> > from the index.html page.
> 
> Do you have a sample rendered output?
> 
> The plan was to try and use Linux's kernel-doc plugin for Sphinx, which
> is very doxygen-like.  Did you experiment with this option?

As you probably know the end goal for Luca (and the Xen FuSa SIG as a
whole) is to generate all FuSa documents, including requirements docs,
interface docs, etc.

FuSa requires us to follow the famous V model, where the high level
requirements are linked to the lower level requirements, which are
linked to the interface docs, which are linked all the way down to the
code.

Maintaining the linking is difficult and typically done with expensive
proprietary FuSa tools.

Fortunately, an engineer working with the Zephyr project developed a set
of scripts for Doxygen that are able to generate the required FuSa docs
and also links from in-code comments and markdown/rst docs in the tree.

This is great work, and in the FuSa SIG we thought it would be best to
align ourselves with Zephyr to be able to pull our efforts together on
the tooling side instead of doing the same thing again on our own.

This is the reason why we ended up with Doxygen.