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.

This is done and put online on a regular basis at http://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

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 Doxygen Source Documentation

MAINT

MASTER

• Doxygen Documentation http://www.stack.nl/~dimitri/doxygen/index.html