Re: The Next Steps

[Paolo Redælli]

Il 11/12/21 14:35, Raphael Mack ha scritto:

> When I was at it I remembered the next steps in terms of
> infrastructure: the debian packages do not properly build anymore, due
> to the huge amount of HTML we generate for the libraries with our
> current version of eiffeldoc and there was no easy fix to significantly
> reduce it. So if anyone is willing to help out here it would be great.

Last time I checked the debian doc package it was huge indeed, something 
like 1,5 Gb.

That was quite unacceptable I shall say. So I ran eiffeldoc on a 
pristine repository, discovering that the generated docs are 449Mb for

8,1M    src/lib/
1,7M    src/tools/
21M    src/wrappers/ (not all wrappers are part of those)

What's interesting is that all those are really compressible, packed 
into a tar.xz those 449mb shrink to a mere 2,9Mb. As far as I can say 
these static pages could be **temporarily** acceptable.


> And we can discuss the level, from the pure HTML-redesign (which would
> not even require any Eiffel experience at all) and someone else could
> apply the changes up to a full blown redesign of eiffeldoc.

Adrian was working on eiffeldoc-ng but I don't remember how much it is 
left to implement.


>   The only
> important target is, that we can generate docs from the source code,
> which is browsable in an easy way and reduces the storage size compared
> to today's dump "let's do many HTML files" approach significantly.

eiffeldoc currently generate 4825 files, while in src/lib/, 
src/smarteiffel/, src/wrappers/ we have 4797 files.

So it roughly generates on HTML file per Eiffel file.

The ideal tool should be an "eiffeldoc-server" which generates and 
serves them on the fly but as far as I can say it clashes with current 
design of the parser, compiler and "documentation design" which are 
meant to be run "statically".

Long, long time ago - at least 12 years and two machines ago - I was 
working on a Gtk interface which generated the actual doc on the fly. I 
started from EIFFELDOC_LIKE tutorial, I could try to "resurrect" it...