Gasp

Copyright 2012 (c) Troels F. Roennow, ETH Zurich

Gasp is a bridge between Doxygen and Sphinx allowing import of Doxygen doc in Sphinx. Gasp loads Doxygen generated XML and provides directives for including extracted docs into the reStructured text.

How does Gasp differ from Breathe?

Breathe is a fine extension to Sphinx and has worked for me in most cases. However, lately I wanted to use it for a different setup than what it was designed for, and I soon realised that I had to change the code. I always panic when I have to modify others source code, if it is any longer than 500 lines, and therefore started writing Gasp.

While inspired by Breathe, Gasp differs on two crucial points:

• It is provided with a XPath like selection langauge.
• HTML/LaTeX/etc is seperated out of the source code such that you easily can customise Gasp to your needs.

Unlike Breathe, Gasp does not provide a fixed design which you have to use for your project. You are rather encouraged to make your own.

Quick start

1. Put Gasp/gasp somewhere in your Python path.
2. Add 'gasp' to your Sphinx extension list.
3. Add "doxygen_xml" to the Sphinx configuration, and add the set this variable to the location where you have your Doxygen XML files.
4. Start using it.

Installing

To install write following::

pip install git+https://github.com/troelsfr/Gasp.git

Using Gasp

Gasp provides two RST tags::

.. doxygen:: [template_name]
   [namespace_selector]
   [option1]
   [option2]

and the reference tag dox-ref (TODO, still needs to be written (I think) ).

Sphinx configuration

Here is an example Sphinx configuration::

THIS_DIR = os.path.dirname(__file__)
doxygen_xml = "_doxygen/xml"
doxygen_templates = [os.path.join(THIS_DIR, "..", "_doxygen_templates")]

This defines where the Doxygen XML can be found and defines place where custom templates can be found. If doxygen_templates is not defined, then the standard templates provided with Gasp is used.

API documentation

To add a class synopsis of the public members to your documentation write::

.. doxygen:: class/synopsis
   foo::bar::class
   :public:

If you also wish to include members which has no brief documentation string add the option ":all:". Likewise, private synopsis page is created as::

.. doxygen:: class/synopsis
   foo::bar::class
   :private:

In order include detailed documentation, write::

.. doxygen:: class/members
   foo::bar::class
   :primary:
   :public:
   :private:
   :all:

The 'primary' option tells the module that this is the main place for documentation of the class "foo::bar::class". All references to this class will be linked here.

Concepts

Gasp adds support for additional Doxygen macros. The macros are realised through the ALIASES variable in Doxygen. As an example one might want to add the functionality of doing concept documentation using Boost archetypes. To this end one would need macros to specify pre- and post conditions. This is done by adding following to the ALIASES in doxygen.conf::

ALIASES += "postcond=\xrefitem postcond \"Post condition\" \"Post condition\" "
ALIASES += "precond=\xrefitem precond \"Pre condition\" \"Pre condition\" "

Gasp has a standard implementation for concept documentation (which may be altered, if the user would like to). To see the full list of aliases needed to be included in doxygen.conf go to the section "Standard Alias Extension". Once the ALIASES has been enabled, one can have code documented as::

namespace concepts{
   class foo_concept {
   public:
      /***
       @brief ...
       @precond some precondition
       @postcond some postcondition
       ***/
       void bar() {}
   };

   /*** 
    @brief some free function related to the concept.
    ***/
   void bar(foo_concept &f) { };
};

which is then included into the RST file as::

.. doxygen:: concept/synopsis
   concepts::*

This will create a concept synopsis for concepts::foo_concept and concepts::bar. (TODO: write the synopsis template)

I don't like Gasp

This is really sad. However, fortunately you can easily customise things to your needs. You should take a look at the templates/ folder in the gasp directory. You can add or modify the standard templates according to your needs, and thanks to the powerful template language of Jinja, one can accomplish quite a few things without ever touching the real source code.

Standard Alias Extension

The standard templates in Gasp implements the following aliases::

ALIASES += "postcond=\xrefitem postcond \"Post condition\" \"Post condition\" "
ALIASES += "precond=\xrefitem precond \"Pre condition\" \"Pre condition\" "
ALIASES += "new_in{1}=\xrefitem newfeature \"New feature\" \"New features\" \xmlonly <version>\1</version> \endxmlonly"
ALIASES += "changed_in{1}=\xrefitem changed \"Changed feature\" \"Changed features\" \xmlonly <version>\1</version> \endxmlonly"
ALIASES += "deprecated_from{1}=\xrefitem deprecated \"Deprecated feature\" \"Deprecated features\" \xmlonly <version>\1</version> \endxmlonly"

After adding this to doxygen.conf, rerun Doxygen to generate the corresponding XML files.

Acknowledgement

This project would probably not have come around if Breathe had not been there. My sincere thanks to the author of Breathe.

License

Copyright (c) 2013-2015, Troels F. Roennow

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a
copy of this software and associated documentation files (the
"Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including
without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish,
distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to
permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to
the following conditions: 

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included
in all copies or substantial portions of the Software. 

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