[Lazarus] FPDoc editor and document placement

[Hans-Peter Diettrich]

Preface: I know how much work a good documentation requires, and honor 
the goodwill of all contributors :-)

Nonetheless most entries (I visited) are in poor state, not helpful and 
often wrong (outdated?). That's why I want to contribute myself, and 
want my documentation *never* overwritten automatically by SVN updates 
(merging of course will be acceptable).

Unfortunately the current help document (xml) management gets into the 
way very often. Here some problems:

- How to share documentation across multiple Lazarus installations?
(including working with Lazarus/FPC branches)

- How to document IDE units? Error: not in a package...

- How to update documents, when these reside in read-only (system) 
directories?


Most annoying is the inability to share updated help, in multiple 
Lazarus branches. This could be made possible by having FPDoc files on a 
machine only once, independently from working copies. Effectively the 
docs should reside in their own SVN repository, not in every Lazarus SVN 
branch.


Currently the help system requires that all documented units belong to a 
package or project. I do not really understand this requirement, in 
detail when Lazarus.lpi is not detected/accepted as the owning project :-(
IMO a default directory could be used to store help on source files, 
whose owner cannot be determined. The source filename could be 
interpreted as <somepath>/projectdir/unit.pp, and the help be stored in 
$(MyLazDocDir)/xml/projectdir/unit.xml.
When the file resides in a subdirectory of the current project, that 
part of the path can be used.


Any comments?

DoDi