Doxygen

Doxygen is a documentation system for C++, C, Java, Python and other language, see http://www.stack.nl/~dimitri/doxygen/index.html.

Wesnoth uses doxygen to generate documentation about its code as html-pages. These are uploaded (currently manually by Mark de Wever) to http://devdocs.wesnoth.org.

Developers can generate these pages locally: in the directory wesnoth/, run the command doxygen Doxyfile

It runs for about 5 minutes, producing about 50 MB of html and graphics. The startpage can than be found at wesnoth/doc/doxygen/html/index.html

To get meaningful documentation, special comments in the code like "//! Calculate X" are used:

• In front of some item (class, function, struct, whatever), as in

//! Show titlepage with logo
TITLE_RESULT show_title(game_display& screen, config& tips_of_day, int* ntip);
...

• just behind some item (variables, enums etc.), as in

enum TITLE_RESULT { TUTORIAL = 0,       //!< Start special campaign 'tutorial'
                    NEW_CAMPAIGN,       //!< Let user select a campaign to play
...

For nice, short examples see titlescreen.hpp and titlescreen.cpp

Doxygen is quite flexible, and supports a lot of commands to customize and fine-tune the resulting documentation, see http://www.stack.nl/~dimitri/doxygen/commands.html

More details

Doxygen needs some config-files (Doxyfile, doc/doxygen/*.html ...). For wesnoth, these have already been set up.

Doxygen keeps about every item a brief and a detailed description.

• The brief description should be short, i.e. a single line.

With the option "JAVADOC_AUTOBRIEF", the first sentence of the comment up to the first dot or linebreak is taken as the brief description. Otherwise, a blank line is used to separate brief and detailed description.

• The detailed description can be as long as you want.

It should be at least 2 lines, so doxygen does not get confused, e.g. thinking it found a second brief description for the same item :-)

• Doxygen recognizes a lot of special keywords, the most important:
  • @file - description for a file
  • @todo - Items for the todo-list
• • @param - description for parameters for functions etc.
  • @return - general description of a return-value (e.g. "length of string")
  • @retval - description for special return-values (e.g. "-1 : error")

An an example, see fade_logo in titlescreen.cpp