Sphinxify the command line documentation #252
Closed
Labels
Comments
I have implemented group support for autoprogram. The PR is currently awaiting review at sphinx-contrib/autoprogram#3. Once that is released, switching from |
latk
added a commit
to latk/gcovr
that referenced
this issue
May 19, 2018
This replaces the `gcovr --help` output with more readable (and linkable!) documentation using autoprogram. This derives derives the documentation neatly from the argparse help messages. closes gcovr#252
Sign up for free
to join this conversation on GitHub.
Already have an account?
Sign in to comment
Currently, the command line docs are rendered in the guide by piping the
gcovr --help
output into a file, and including it as a literal block. This works … but is ugly, hard to read, and cannot be used to link to a specific option.Can we use some Sphinx features to improve this documentation, without having to duplicate the command line docs?
Of course, there are already Sphinx plugins that might be helpful:
sphinxcontrib.autoprogram renders the command line parameters nicely. However, it lumps all argument groups together which hides valuable context and makes the long list of options more difficult to read.
sphinx-argparse does render argument groups correctly, but uses tables for layout instead of the correct Sphinx roles. These tables overflow and have to be scrolled horizontally. Also, option value placeholders (metavars) are not rendered, which makes the phrasing of some option help messages difficult to read.
Due to these problems, neither of those plugins is currently a good replacement for the CLI documentation.
Help wanted:
Are there any other alternatives that do not suffer from these problems?
If no alternative exists, could the existing modules be extended to address these issues? E.g. I believe it would be possible to add subgroup support to autoprogram since it already supports subparsers.
The text was updated successfully, but these errors were encountered: