Modern Data documentation project

This is a project to provide more detailed documentation for Modern Data.

Invocation

You will probably first need to modify the modern-header-file path in config.yaml: this should point to the modern.h file from the Modern Data repository. Output should end up in the build directory.

./build.py html should generate the documentation. You can also try ./build.py pdf if you've got pdflatex present.

Subcommands (for hacking purposes):

• ./build.py regen will generate the ReST documentation in the rstsource directory. This is used as input by Sphinx, but you could read it directly if you want. Or, perhaps you can use it as input to another tool!
• • config.yaml is used to provide some control over how this script works. The mask-file setting is particularly useful for hacking: the named file contains one path per line (e.g. content/builtins), and serves to exclude those entries from the build. This can reduce build times while you're debugging.

Functionality

We start from the YAML and ReST files in the content directory. The ReST files are mostly just copied across to the rstsource directory, and the YAML files are used to generate detailed documentation for heavily-structured things like e.g. builtins. The YAML files for the C-library functions just list function names and semantics, without specifying a signature: instead, the function signatures are parsed directly from modern.h and included in the ReST output.

We also do some validation. Right now the only validations are:

• ensure that no two builtins have accidentally been assigned the same numeric ID
• ensure that all builtin type signatures resolve down to correctly-named basic types (typo prevention)

You will need

• Python 3
• pip install pycparser
• pip install pyyaml
• Sphinx documentation generator
• the modern.h header from the Modern Data repository (this file is parsed to extract some type signatures)

Optionally

• If you want to build PDF output, you will need pdflatex.

Links

• home repository: https://github.com/tinyplasticgreyknight/modern-docs
• Modern Data home repository: https://github.com/IreneKnapp/modern-data