[lazarus] documentation

[Marco Schmidt]

I tested my documentation program pasdoc with the latest LCL download.
Pasdoc aborted unit parsing on every occurrence of a property with no
type, e.g. Visible in class TStatusBar in unit comctrls or Caption in
class TPage in unit extctrls. Where is such a property without a type
useful? Anyway, I fixed some pasdoc bugs, implemented support for
those no-type properties and get no more complains with Lazarus or LCL
code. I'll try the latest CVS version later.

I was glad to read in the status section of the website that you'd
like to use pasdoc for documentation. As in-depth descriptions of each
item in comments would result in a large, crowded interface section,
I'm currently implementing support for external description files
which would hold the documentation. At the moment, very little
documentation is done in Lazarus / LCL, so switching to external files
would be no big deal. The number of external files is not restricted
in any direction, but I'd say it makes sense to define one external
file per unit. The file name should be given to pasdoc in the single
remaining comment of that, e.g.

{ @descrfile(stdcontrols.txt) }
unit stdcontrols;
...

The name could also be given to pasdoc using the -c switch:

pasdoc -h stdcontrols.pp -c stdcontrols.txt ...

Which way do you prefer, external files or interface section comments?
A mixture of both would be possible but a bit confusing.

If pasdoc is to be used for people to learn the internals of Lazarus'
code, there should also be an automated update of the online HTML docs
on a daily basis.

I released the latest fixes as version 0.6.7 as
- source http://www.kawo2.rwth-aachen.de/~schmidt/pasdoc-0.6.7-src.zip
- win32 binaries
http://www.kawo2.rwth-aachen.de/~schmidt/pasdoc-0.6.7-bin-win32.zip

Visit the homepage for more information:
http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Lakes/6686/pasdoc.html

Regards,
Marco