Re: [PATCH v3 00/17] kernel-doc: add supported to document nested structs/

[Markus Heiser]

> Am 07.10.2017 um 18:34 schrieb Jonathan Corbet <corbet@xxxxxxx>:
> 
> On Wed,  4 Oct 2017 08:48:38 -0300
> Mauro Carvalho Chehab <mchehab@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> 
>> Right now, it is not possible to document nested struct and nested unions.
>> kernel-doc simply ignore them.
>> 
>> Add support to document them.
> 
> So I've finally found some time to actually look at these; sorry for being
> so absent from the discussion.  I plead $EXCUSES...
> 
> Some overall impressions:
> 
> - Seems like something we want.
> - I love hacking all the cruft out of kernel-doc; I've been meaning to
>  do that for a bit.
> - It would sure be nice to restore proper man-page generation rather than
>  documenting a hack with a perl script.  Someday.
> 
> I have one real complaint, though: with these patches applied, a "make
> htmldocs" generates about 5500 (!) more warnings than it did before.  Over
> the last couple of months, I put a bit of focused time into reducing
> warnings, and managed to get rid of 20-30 of them.  Now I feel despondent.
> 
> I really don't want to add that much noise to the docs build; I think it
> will defeat any hope of cleaning up the warnings we already have.  I
> wonder if we could suppress warnings about nested structs by default, and
> add a flag or envar to turn them back on for those who want them?

This is what I vote for: +1

> In truth, now that I look, the real problem is that the warnings are
> repeated many times - as in, like 100 times:
> 
>> ./include/net/cfg80211.h:4115: warning: Function parameter or member 'wext.ibss' not described in 'wireless_dev'
>> ./include/net/cfg80211.h:4115: warning: Function parameter or member 'wext.ibss' not described in 'wireless_dev'
> <107 instances deleted...>
>> ./include/net/cfg80211.h:4115: warning: Function parameter or member 'wext.ibss' not described in 'wireless_dev'
> 
> That's not something that used to happen, and is certainly not helpful.
> Figuring that out would help a lot.  Can I get you to take a look at
> what's going on here?

Hi Jon, if you grep for 

 .. kernel-doc:: include/net/cfg80211.h

e.g. by:  grep cfg80211.h Documentation/driver-api/80211/cfg80211.rst | wc -l
you will see, that this directive is used 110 times in one reST file. If you
have 5 warnings about the kernel-doc markup in include/net/cfg80211.h you will
get 550 warnings about kernel-doc markup just for just one source code file.

This is because the kernel-doc parser is an external process which is called
(in this example) 110 times for one reST file and one source code file. If 
include/net/cfg80211.h is referred in other reST files, we got accordingly
more and more warnings .. thats really noise. 

So what I see is, that a major part of such noise is self made, it was one major
goal when I started with the python implementation: run kernel-doc parser in the 
Sphinx process, cache the results and use it in all reST files where it is required
from a kernel-doc directive.

Since there is also a man page solution in the py- version I vote to merge the
py-version into the kernel (ATM man is similar to what we had in DocBook and
it is expandable). If you want to have a preview of the result, try this patch:

 https://return42.github.io/linuxdoc/linux.html

The only drawback of the py version I see is, that Mauro prefers perl and I do
not want to lose him as an contributer to the kernel-doc parser. IMO he is an
experienced C programmer with an excellent regexpr knowledge. This is, what is
needed for this job. May be we can motivate him to give python one more try,
this is what I hope.

The py version includes all patches we had to the perl version, but I also
know, that you are not 100% compliant with the coding style, this could
all be fixed in a RFC round. Excuse me if I annoying with this solution;
IMO it contains what we need, if we really want to make a step forward.

Thanks,

-- Markus --

> 
> Thanks,
> 
> jon
> 
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