some questions about gtk-doc

[Thomas Vander Stichele <thomas apestaart org>]

Hi everyone,

I've been delving a bit deeper into gtk-doc recently because I wanted to
add documentation for plugins and elements in GStreamer.

While doing so I've come across a few things I wanted to ask:

a) it looks to me like enums that are registered with glib aren't
extracted; only the C-level enums are.  In GStreamer, a tool called
gst-inspect extracts the extra information from registered enums when
describing signals and properties, which looks like this:

  recover-policy      : How to recover when client reaches the soft max
                        Enum "GstTCPRecoverPolicy" (default 0, "Do not
try to recover")
                           (0):         Do not try to recover
                           (1):         Resync client to most recent
buffer
                           (2):         Resync client to soft limit
                           (3):         Resync client to most recent
keyframe

Any reason why gtk-doc doesn't have this ? What would be the best way to
add this - have the scanner write a .enums file, and then incorporate
this ?

b) There is some extra information I would like to plug into the
generated xml.  I've tried doing an xi:include in my tmpl/*.sgml files,
but there's no xmlns: directive generated for XInclude as part of
the .xml files build.  Would it make sense to add this ?

c) I have a hard time hacking on gtk-doc because I tend to have to copy
the tools from /usr to my local dir, tweak my build setup, and remove a
bunch of commented prints to see what's going on.  Would it make sense
to do this more nicely by checking an env var and outputting this debug
info if the env var is set ?

d) It'd be nice if there were ways to hook into various parts of the
gtk-doc tools at certain steps.  For example, for doing the scan step I
really only needed to override the way types were scanned for; instead
of doing a .types file with all _get_type methods, I had to examine
GStreamer's registry and instantiate element factories that have the
GTypes.  So I had to change maybe 50 lines in gtkdoc-scangobj, which
would've been nice to put in through a hook instead of copying and
changing locally.  Has anyone ever thought of making these
customizations more easy ?

That's it for now, I appreciate any pointers to help me further on.

Thanks,
Thomas

P.S.: anyone ever considered redoing gtk-doc in, say, python ?


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