[Lazarus] Extending FCL documentation

[Hans-Peter Diettrich]

Mattias Gaertner schrieb:
> On Sun, 05 Feb 2012 19:03:44 +0100
> Hans-Peter Diettrich <DrDiettrich1 at aol.com> wrote:
> 
>> In the meantime I added another feature to the FPDocManager, that shall 
>> allow to add description directories to documentation packages. The GUI 
>> is a bit rudimentary for now, deserves some improvements.
>>
>> This feature can e.g. be used to add the descriptions in 
>> $Lazarus/docs/xml/fcl to the official FCL documentation. At least this 
>> part works already :-)
> 
> Why are docs for fcl units in the Lazarus sources?

I'm not sure. They may be a relict from attempts to document a few 
currently used units, using the FPDoc Editor. Since these docs don't 
meet the high standards of the official FCL docs, I never supplied them 
to FPC.

Some time ago I agreed to delete the xml/fcl folder, but perhaps others 
did contribute to them as well, and declined to remove it.

There exists one problem with local adds to the documentation: LazDE 
reformats the XML files in a way, that makes it almost impossible to 
create patches, or to merge them with new revisions of the original 
sources. Using the FPDoc Editor for updates (concurrently) can result in 
the same problems :-(

Recently another problem arose, when a FCL package was added to Lazarus, 
which does not reflect the FPC FCL.


After various attempts to fix errors and to extend the current 
documentation, I think that there exist reasons for maintaining 
additional documentation directories, which are *not* under version 
control - that's why I agreed to remove the fcl folder from the Lazarus 
repository. But it still should be possible to maintain local docs, 
unaffected by SVN updates, until we find an way to prevent conflicts or 
losses during SVN update.

DoDi