On Mon, Dec 4, 2023 at 8:49 AM Andrey Semashev via Boost < boost@lists.boost.org> wrote:

Thanks. Looks like the tool might become a good alternative to Doxygen in the future, if it is configurable enough and integrates well with QuickBook.

The kind words are appreciated! I will address some points, leaving the other responses to Krystian. 1. In general, avoid wasting space on the sides of the content. Make the

output span the majority of the display width.

That's a function of the templates used by the asciidoc tool and not something that mrdocs controls. What you are seeing in this demo is the result of running asciidoc on the output of mrdocs. The mrdocs tool produces Asciidoc output. For example here is one of the output files produced by our tool: https://mrdocs.com/demos/develop/boost-scope/multi/adoc/boost/scope.adoc 2.

https://mrdocs.com/demos/develop/boost-scope/multi/adoc-asciidoc/boost/scope...

I would prefer if there was a separation of components by headers instead of alphabetical lists of types, functions, etc.

For our first mrdocs deliverable we are targeting libraries like Boost.URL, Boost.JSON, Boost.Beast, et. al. which present the reference in the same style as Boost.Asio from which they were copied. I recognize that this is completely different from the other model of presenting the reference which works on an individual header file basis and also shows the full declaration of the class. Personally I prefer the Asio style over the per-header/full declaration but to each their own. A core principle of mrdocs is that it is not opinionated and will permit full customization of the output and style. Therefore our roadmap includes a set of mrdocs templates and features to be able to completely replicate the per-header/full declaration style found in other Boost documentation. 3.7. Any links to GitHub should use permalinks rather than links to

branches.

This is configured by the author in the mrdocs.yml file I don't want private stuff like types in detail namespace to be present in the generated docs. The mrdocs.yml permits namespace blacklists and whitelists with wildcards.

7. I hope there is a way to export information from the reference documentation in an XML

Currently there are three Generators: Asciidoc, HTML, and XML. The XML generator is intended to capture the entire metadata generated during AST traversal at full fidelity. We use the XML generator to test metadata output. or QuickBook format Well no we do not have a Quickbook generator, nor is there one planned. We chose Asciidoc because the Quickbook toolchain is old, unmaintained, and represents an existential risk to libraries which depend on it. Mrdocs has a plugin system using shared libraries which allows anyone to write a generator without the need to recompile mrdocs or to install and build clang/llvm locally.

so that it is possible to add links to specific classes and functions reference

pages from the main documentation in QuickBook. (Yes, QuickBook is a requirement from me, plain AsciiDoc doesn't offer some very useful features for me to consider it a format to write in.) We are positioning Antora as the premiere solution for modernization of Boost documentation. It is important to distinguish Asciidoc from Asciidoctor. Asciidoc is the markdown format while Asciidoctor is the tool which converts Asciidoc files into HTML. Antora ingests Asciidoc files and emits HTML. The Antora system has a more rich set of features than straight Asciidoc. If you have specific features from Quickbook that are not present when running Asciidoctor, I would ask that you open issues or identify these features so we can ensure they are available in the Antora solution which we are building. This is an example of Antora output. The input files are Asciidoc: https://www.preview.boost.org/doc/contributor-guide/index.html Thanks

On 12/5/23 16:48, Krystian Stasiowski via Boost wrote:

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Also, I don't think deduction guides need to be listed on that page.

The plan is for deduction guides and template specializations to be associated with the primary template and enumerated on its corresponding documentation page.

I think, there's not much value in listing deduction guides anywhere at all. Also, if you're going to show the deduction guides, then please show them in full, instead of just the resulting type.

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3.4. Member functions should show the complete function signatures, not just names.

Only the names are shown because overloads are grouped together and have their signatures displayed on a separate page. This keeps the list of members compact. Regardless, wouldn't this be made redundant by showing the full class definition in the synopsis?

Different function overloads should be presented separately. Their documentation often differ, too. Function signature should be near the function description so that the user can see its parameters and return type, which are described in the function documentation. Having to seek between the synopsis and function description is a terrible user experience.

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Also, it should probably separate constructors, destructor, assignment operrators, other operators and regular member functions. A simple alphabetical list doesn't make sense.

3.5. The list of functions should not contain deleted functions. If the synopsis already shows them as deleted, there's no need to show them separately in the function list without any description. In the linked page, this pertains to the "operator=" and "scope_exit" entries.

It is impossible to have built-in support for every grouping and ordering of member functions a user may desire. The handlebars templates that ship with Mr. Docs will support a few variations, but it's ultimately up to the user to customize them to their liking.

It doesn't need to be customizable, a fixed grouping like the one I described would be enough. Re. deleted functions, that's not about grouping at all.

4. I hope, there is a way to detect Mr. Docs in code by testing a

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predefined macro. This is useful in order to cleaning up the code for documentation.

You can define macros in the config file. That being said, the resulting code should still be (mostly) valid, otherwise clang will not create AST nodes in more extreme cases.

I think the documentation tool should be more tolerant to code validity than a plain compiler. Hiding stuff from documentation for readability, where the resulting code is not a conforming C++ is common practice; even the C++ standard does this.

For example, I don't want private stuff like types in

...

detail namespace to be present in the generated docs.

The config allows for declarations whose qualified name matches a pattern (e.g. "boost::*::detail") to be blacklisted. By default, these filters are ignored when the "interface" of a documented declaration depends on another (e.g. class A : public detail::B), but this behavior can be disabled.

Such filters don't always work. For example, here: https://mrdocs.com/demos/develop/boost-scope/multi/adoc-asciidoc/boost/scope... you can see the type `data` is used in the documentation. This is a private type (i.e. it is defined in a private section of the unique_resource class) that should not be present in the docs.

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I would also like to hide SFINAE tricks.

In the future we plan to detect the enable_if idiom (and others) and convert them to equivalent constraints, but this is way down the road. For now, macros will have to suffice.

I don't think auto-detection is needed. Just make it easy to hide stuff from docs and make the tool more tolerant to non-conforming C++, that would be enough, IMHO.