There was quite some discussion on creating a central build system for the documentation projects, and livedocs will be a move towards this direction, since it should be developed with portability in mind
I inherited a lot of non-standard xml, as you know. We also have the problem that php-gtk-doc describes a hierarchy of objects rather than a list of functions - I'm keeping one eye on phpdoc to know how you resolve the issues that arise from describing objects in PHP5, since it is the direct cause of most of our non-standard areas. I still haven't seen a version of livedocs that works out of the box here, and won't transfer across until that happens. Currently I have to rewrite large chunks of it to make it usable - and this is _after_ making several changes to the xml structure we originally had. I only just found out there was a bug reporting mechanism in place for it; there wasn't a public announcement of this, or if there was I missed it. The last bug report updates were apparently made on August 4th. I have severe reservations about relying on software with so little testing; no reflection on Wez and Derick's abilities intended, but I think this needs to be a more public project with a greater level of accountability before we can start to consider it robust.
To clear things up once and for all :) Wez started livedocs on his own machine without any revision control, and then some curious people peaked in (Derick Ilia and myself). Wez tried to keep the development general away from the specialized needs of phpdoc, but still suitable for phpdoc (I hope this is clear :). So the development was done on cvs.thebrainroom.com. I was able to convince Wez lately that livedocs should be moved to cvs.php.net, now we are waiting to Wez to provide a tgz of the module, so someone from the system guys can import it into cvs.php.net... There have not been much publicity on livedocs, since there was not much point in advertising something that does not work... Now that it works mostly for phpdoc, we can start sorting out the missing parts, and making it more reuseable on the way for PEAR and PHP-GTK. So it will be in php.net cvs, and those who would like to contribute code will get access (keeping in mind that we would like to keep it a general tool to be useable for all the PHP subprojects and others too).
for non PHP.net projects to utilize). That would replace many of the configure options and make targets of phpdoc (as well as php-gtk-doc and peardoc in case those teams will utilize livedocs too). That would greatly simplify things...
Agreed. But again, the build system we have in place provably works, and it will take a lot of testing before I'm happy to move on to something as yet unproven.
Livedocs is still in development, it is very true. But unless we put effort into development and testing it will not become better. I would not like to propose it to be used without more advancement and testing...
I am looking at the build system from the ease-of-use perspective. If you only need to checkout the CVS module and can directly run the PHP script, it is much easier then installing cygwin, getting familiar with the command line, and put all the tools on the appropriate paths...
Hm, the only tool we need to add manually here is PHP actually :) I haven't tried to build livedocs outside a Cygwin environment either, although the unix tools needed for that are (I believe) all available for download as win32 native executables.
Hm, I am sure the phpdoc build system would not work with the configure.in file outside of cygwin, even if the tools are available as native windows .exe files, since the configure system is tailored for unix tools...
Since livedocs will hopefully make most of the current make targets obsolote, the build system will be much smaller, and easier to port to another environment (eg. Phing).
Again, too new to be considered as production standard IMHO. I still think the 'wait and see' approach is more justifiable.
Actually I would not like to wait more, but put effort into making it working... Since I also work at the PHP websites, and I get more and more frustrated because of the missing onsite search, and the ugly HTML produced by the DSSSL sheets I would like to make livedocs work for the PHP sites ASAP (with public beta testing before it could replace the current docs :). ASAP means "in the coming months" :))
Goba
