Re: RFC: documentation browser

[Giovanni Campagna <scampa giovanni gmail com>]

Hi Philip!

On Tue, Jan 5, 2016 at 11:08 PM, philip chimento gmail com wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I've been working on a documentation browser for documentation 
> generated from GObject introspection files. Besides good old DevHelp 
> on the desktop, there are several good online open-source 
> documentation browsers that already exist, and one of them is DevDocs 
> [1] which has lots of nifty features such as fuzzy search and storing 
> documentation for offline use.
>
> I have a branch of gobject-introspection [2] which modifies 
> g-ir-doc-tool to generate docs that can then be imported by a branch 
> of DevDocs [3]. Among the modifications to g-ir-doc-tool is a 
> refactoring to give it an output format switch which I've already 
> filed as bgo#750534 [4].
>
> I've hosted an instance of the modified DevDocs on AWS [5]. This link 
> is temporary, because at some point it'll start costing me money. I 
> also have instructions [6] for how I set up DevDocs from a bare RHEL 
> 7 install on AWS in case anyone wants to replicate it themselves.
>
> If you're interested in this, please give it a try and let me know 
> your thoughts and suggestions. I'm hoping to get more people 
> interested in it, especially with the upcoming DX hackfest.

Thanks for working on this.
Compared to my previous effort, but similar to other efforts, this 
lacks the manual docs that were written for GLib and GObject (eg 
GObject.Class, GObject.Void and GLib.Variant).
What is the best way to bridge those documents to the new system? Is it 
possible to manually edit the output of the modified g-ir-doc-tool, at 
least for GLib, GObject? Gio (Gio.DBus) and Gtk (Gtk.WidgetClass 
override for templates) potentially need manual editing too.
Also, it seems the parameter naming and listing is wrong/confusing for 
out parameters and for arrays (I haven't checked callbacks), which is 
surprising since g-ir-doc-tool should do the right thing. 
Unfortunately, those are the most painful points to understand when 
using gjs, so they need to be addressed before this goes public.

Cheers,

Giovanni