Tools for getting/maintaining the Big Picture

[pepr]

Tools for getting/maintaining the Big Picture

I personally consider important to get Big Picture of what was done and what should be done (being the person with poor long-memory capability).

Doxygen + graphviz + doxypypy

Doxygen is a document generator available for both Linux and Windows. You can download precompiled binaries from here. It can use the graphviz tool to generate various graphs, including the call graph that shows the relations of the part of the code. The doxypypy filter must be installed explicitly for Python 3 as it compiles the Python source that is to be documented by Doxygen. It is used for on-the-fly transforming Python doc-strings to the special comments accepted by Doxygen.

Note: The Doxyfile configuration file in the same directory as the asciidoc3.py. It was created for Windows. Create a separate one for the same purpose on Linux. The configuration file name can be changed in future to make apparent for what version of OS and for what version of Python it is used. (The Python 2 and Python 3 versions must be documented separately because of the doxypypy filter.)

Doxygen is launched from command line doxygen Doxyfile or simply doxygen (Doxyfile is the default name for the configuration file -- see the note above).

The progdoc/html/ subdirectory is created. The progdoc/html/index.html is the root document. The progdoc/ subdirectory was excluded from the repository as it is quite big, and (re)generating the content is not time consuming.

Mind Map -- Freeplane

Freeplane (implemented in Java, that is multiplatform) is a nice tool for creating/editing mind maps -- basically an non-sequential form of writing notes. See AsciiDoc_big_picture.mm (early version of the file was created before using Doxygen for the project -- progdoc/ may be better for sniffing for the current structure of the implementation).