Yorick-doc

Yorick-doc generates the [http://dhmunro.github.com/yorick-doc] website. Yorick plugins and packages with git repositories can use yorick-doc to generate and maintain their own html documentation in a format consistent with this main yorick website. Such branch websites can be connected to the main yorick-doc website by issuing a pull request at [http://github.com/dhmunro/yorick-doc] to add their URL to the main pages.

Getting yorick-doc

Begin by cloning the yorick-doc github repo:

git clone git://github.com/dhmunro/yorick-doc.git

(or you can fork your own yorick-doc repo at github.com). This repo contains the yorick-doc perl scripts for generating yorick documentation.

The yorick-doc.git repo also contains the main yorick web pages, if you want to make a local copy of the main website. According to the github web pages convention, the gh-pages repo branch contains the main website. For yorick-doc itself, the master and gh-pages branches are identical.

If all you want is a copy of the main yorick website, get it from [http://github.com/ghmunro/yorick-doc/tarball/gh-pages]. (Or substitute zipball for tarball if you prefer zip format.)

Dependencies

• git
• perl
• texi2html (tested with v1.82) to build the yorick manual, required for building the yorick user manual only

Running yorick-doc

With the current working directory the top-level of yorick-doc/ created by git clone (master branch), the command line is:

perl ydoc.pl [-u] [-n pkgname] [-i ghpath] [srcpath [title]]

The srcpath is the path to the yorick plugin or package for which you want to create a website. The automatically generated site will comprise all of the DOCUMENT comments in the .i files therein.

The -u option tells ydoc.pl to update (or create) a gh-pages branch for the yorick package or plugin source at srcpath, which must be the working directory of a git repo for that option to make sense.

By default, the plugin or package name will be the final component of srcpath. You can override this by supplying -n pkgname, which would be necessary if, for example, the final component of you srcpath contained a version number (unusual if it is a git repo). This option is unnecessary if a gh-pages branch already exists, unless you want to change the existing pkgname.

The title parameter will appear as the title of your website, prefixed by the word "Yorick" (in the banner). You need to supply title only if srcpath has no gh-pages branch, or if you want to change the title in gh-pages.

The result will be written to a gh-pages/ directory where you ran ydoc.pl, that is, in the top level of yorick-doc. If srcpath is a git repo with a gh-pages branch, this output directory is initialized to the gh-pages branch. Therefore, you can modify files which are not automatically generated and your modifications will be preserved, if you commit them to the gh-pages branch in srcpath. If your srcpath is not a git repo or has no gh-pages branch, ydoc.pl creates a simple default containing all the required files.

Alternatively, you can use the -i option to specify a ghpath in lieu of a gh-pages branch in srcpath. This permits you to save and manage your modifications to the gh-pages/ directory, even if srcpath is not a git repo, or if you simply do not wish to add a gh-pages branch. Be sure you copy the gh-pages/ directory to some permanent source-code-managed location (ghpath).

Additionally, ydoc.pl writes a file gh-pages.src containing the srcpath argument used to generate gh-pages/. This permits you to omit the srcpath argument in subsequent invocations of ydoc.pl. The rule is: If you supply srcpath, any existing gh-pages/ and gh-pages.src will be clobbered and replaced, while if you omit srcpath, they must be present and will remain unchanged.

Without the srcpath argument, ydoc.pl will operate on the gh-pages/ directory it created in a previous invocation. The contents of gh-pages/ are not the final web pages. Github runs the static site generator jekyll to build the actual html pages. Yorick-doc includes a simple perl script implementing the tiny subset of jekyll it needs, which allows you to generate the html files whether or not you have jekyll on your platform. Without any arguments,

perl ydoc.pl

will generate the actual html pages from gh-pages/, placing them in the sibling _site/ directory. This allows you to preview your website locally with your browser. You may wish to do that before you update your gh-pages branch.

Running

perl ydoc.pl -u

updates the gh-pages branch (in srcpath, as saved in gh-pages.src) from the contents of the gh-pages/ directory, without regenerating it. If no gh-pages branch exists (but srcpath is a git repo), ydoc.pl creates one, and intializes it with the contents of the gh-pages/ directory.

Customizing yorick-doc

The ydoc.pl script produces one html file per .i file in your source tree containing any yorick DOCUMENT comments (a "documented .i file"). If you have more than one .i file, it also produces an html index file with links to all the individual files, and an alphabetized index of all the documented symbols. If you have only one documented .i file, the index will be combined with it. At the top of each page is an alphabetized list of links to the symbols documented on that page.

You can split a large .i file into several pages by inserting comment lines in the .i file of the form:

/*= SECTION(name) brief description ==========================/

The brief description will show up in the section index, next to the page name. You can leave out name, SECTION() and put the divider comment line near the top of the file to get a brief description into the index file, even when you do not want to split the page. The page name for file.i will be file; if the file is divided into multiple sections, the page name for section sect will be file-sect.

You can also edit the files in gh-pages/ which are not automatically generated, in order to add more information about your plugin or package, or to (slightly) modify the style, for example, by creating a custom left sidebar. Read the jekyll docs for more information.

In particular, you are strongly encouraged to edit the file gh-pages/_includes/package.html, which by default contains only the briefest description of what your package does -- in fact, just its title. Don't forget that this is a part of an xhtml file, so put <p> and </p> markup around your paragraph(s). You can add a link to a separate html jekyll template file if you want to add more extensive descriptions.

Credits

The yorick-doc pages use a very clean left sidebar page layout designed by Matthew James Taylor.