Re: [Qemu-devel] Introducing GSoC project: API Documentation Generation

[Paolo Bonzini]

On 21/05/19 17:27, Peter Maydell wrote:
>> Anyway.  What's so special about QEMU that justifies coming up with our
>> own doc syntax?  Other than "we made a hash of it, and cleaning it up
>> would be work".
> The major problem as far as kernel-doc is concerned is that
> it somewhat bakes in the kernel's style choice that the
> 'struct' keyword is not hidden behind typedefs, and so it
> gets a bit confused by QEMU's "use typedefs for struct types"
> style. The rest, as you say, is just a matter of fixing up
> our syntax errors.

Exactly, "QEMU's syntax" is supposed to be actually gtkdoc, or inspired
by it, because of the similar typedef conventions.  The basic components
are:

- the head of the doc comment is either a CamelCase type or a function
name followed by parentheses

- @ introduces parameters, e.g. @path

- % introduces types, e.g. %DeviceState

- () terminate functions, e.g. memory_region_init()

- # introduces other C symbols, e.g. #NULL

and they map very well to what kerneldoc tries to parse, IIRC it only
requires some changes to the regular expression at the top of the file.

Paolo