[Muddleftpd-users] Documentation framework

[Beau Alan Kuiper]

Hi,

Since documentation is as hard (if not harder) than programming, I have 
just been thinking about writing a tool that helps automate the more 
tedious parts of documentation for muddleftpd.

I have included my ideas below, and I am wondering if the list would be 
happy to work with such a system? If you don't like it, please speak up, 
otherwise I will assume you don't mind!

Specifications of quick and dirty document generator:

* Uses text files, one file per documentations section (so each directive 
will have its own text file, and so on)
* uses simple directives to command the parser to do various things. ( 
they will have / at the beginning of the line for most of them ) Various 
things will include index entries, contents page entries, advanced 
formatting (like bullet lists), and hyperlinks.
* contents entries will be described with labels rather than strings, so 
that renumbering the contents is not difficult.
* automaticly generates contents and index pages, and automaticly assignes 
numbers for contents. (if told to) This is so that numbering the contents 
page doesn't become a pain in the neck.
* can generate output to targets of html (single page), html (multiple 
page), plain text, print formatted plain text (to send to printer), 
manpage, infotext and maybe others, automaticly handling details properly.

Implementation ideas:

* I will do this in perl. Perl is perfect for this text processing job, 
and doesn't have the problems C has with string processing.
* I will probably hava a backend that decodes the text file inputs into 
several data structures, and then pass those data structures to a frontend 
that converts them to the target language.
* Performance of the software is not highly important, but it must be able 
to fully build the documentation in less than a minute on my old celeron 
416. (I think this is a rather pessimistic figure though, I bet it will be 
much faster)