> From: Marcus Lindblom
> Hi Toni,
> 
> I agree that important classes (i.e. 'Node') and exceptional cases 
> should be documented. But as long as we are mostly developers, my 
> opinion is that adding fine-grit documentation is something of a waste 
> of good development time.

Developers of OpenSG, or developers of software that uses OpenSG?  If 
the former, fine, but if the latter... how is anyone supposed to learn 
the system?

> For NodePtr getChild(index), it's pretty obvious that you get a null ptr 
> if the index is out of range, since that is common engineering practise. 
> (If getChild returned a reference, then you'd need some documentation 
> saying if an exception gets thrown or whatever.)

Is it obvious though?  For a new user to OpenSG, there's a very real 
chance of checking the returned pointer against NULL, not NullFC...

 From my own experiences of learning OpenSG (and getting a very sore 
head from hitting it against the desk) I strongly recommend that 
everything is documented if the system is to ever reach a critical mass. 
  This documentation process needs to be done by those who understand 
exactly how it works, i.e. the person who wrote it.  Getting a 
third-party to document will just result in misleading info everywhere.

It's also worth mentioning that there are also inconsistencies in the 
documentation that does exist!

> Documenting everything, while being a honorable goal and useful for 
> adopting people fast, takes a lot of time to do, 

Agreed, a very long time.  But it's the one thing that makes writing 
code that uses APIs an enjoyable task.  I don't enjoy coding pain.

> On good doc-api-examples, someone mentioned to me that Coin3D has pretty 
> good doxygen documentation. I think they also put most of the doxygen 
> stuff in the .cpp-files, but I haven't looked at it.
> 
> /Marcus

Phil

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