Doxygen

Doxygen is the central point for source documentation at this moment (January 2011).

It is a software which extracts (special) comments from sourcecode to produce source documentation.

Nightlies

This is done and put online on a regular basis at code.gnucash.org/docs/ for both branches :

MAINT, the next minor bugfix and

MASTER, the next major release.

Creating the Source Documentation

It can be run on your local copy of the sources by

make doc

or if building with ninja:

ninja doc

Important

You need to have doxygen installed for this. Otherwise the target doc will not be available.

This will populate ${BUILDDIR}/libgnucash/doc. Problems will be logged there to doxygen.log. The HTML docs can be found in it's subdirectory html.

It's configuration gets created from ${SOURCEDIR}/libgnucash/doc/doxygen.cfg.in.

Doxygen Elements

• To mark a C style comment for Doxygen, it has to start with /** or /*!.
• Usually the explaining comment should be in front of a declaration. If the comment is behind a member declaration, the next symbol should be <, resulting in /**< or /*!<.
• Doxygen keywords begin with \ or @.
• To document global objects, you must document the file in which they are defined:

   /*! \file */
  

or

 /** @file */

Improving the Source Documentation

A header file of a public API should have the following Doxygen section:

/**
 * @addtogroup <module>
 * @{
 * @file
 * @brief <A brief description>
 * @author Copyright (C) <year> <name> <email>
 */

where <module> is usually the name of the directory.

Links

GnuCash API Documentation

MAINT

MASTER

Doxygen

Website

Repository