[Lazarus] Documentation update (CHM building, lazutils)

[Hans-Peter Diettrich]

Bernd schrieb:
> 2011/12/30 Hans-Peter Diettrich <DrDiettrich1 at aol.com>:
> 
>> I don't understand why (platform specific) shell scripts shall be used for
>> documentation purposes - is Pascal not suited for such tasks? ;-)
> 
> How about putting all the functionality necessary to build the
> documentation into lazbuild? It already has an option to build the IDE
> (lazbuild --build-ide), it has all units needed to read current
> Lazarus configuration, paths, etc, wouldn't it be consequent to make
> it also able to replace the shell scripts to build the docs (lazbuild
> --build-chmdoc)?

IMO there exist too many user options, which are not reflected in a 
standard build, e.g. the output documentation directories on the server 
or user machine.

At least the generation of the documentation projects should be 
automated somehow, then every user can modify these projects according 
to his needs. I go different ways for building FPC and Lazarus 
documentation projects:

The RTL and FCL documentation is generated by a Makefile, so that the 
generated commandline can be recorded instead of excecuted (-n 
 >mydoc.bat). The LazDoc Manager imports these commandlines and creates 
the project files. An additional Makefile option could write the project 
files immediately, instead of creating the output.

The documentation of Lazarus packages instead shall be collected from 
the LPK files (not yet complete). The Makefile here is of little help, 
because the only mentioned source file is the synthetic allunits.pas 
file, which would deserve another parse. But of course options could be 
added (to LazBuild or the Makefile) to create the documentation 
(projects) like for the FPC documentation.

Once these project files exist, they can be modified or configured by 
the user, and the final documentation can be built in a simple script, 
containing lines like ("?" to be substituted):
fpdoc --project=? --format=? --output=?

Merging multiple documentation packages into one output file is not 
supported by fpdoc, so that e.g. the LCL documentation in one file would 
require to import the LCL, LCLBase and LazUtils packages into the same 
LCL package. I've put this feature into the LazDoc Manager already.

DoDi