Declt 1.0 is out
By Didier Verna on Saturday, August 24 2013, 17:58 - Lisp - Permalink
After 15 betas, I'm happy enough with the current state of Declt to finally make a 1.0 release.
A lot of things have changed since the previous version, sometimes in a backward-incompatible way. Many more items are documented (including, as you have recently seen, method combinations). In addition to the reference manual, generated by Declt itself, there is now a real user manual.
Declt is still SBCL-only, requires ASDF 3 and Texinfo 4 but generates code that is compatible with Texinfo 5. Also, beware, I've deleted the old repository and moved the project to GitHub. Below is a more precise description of what Declt currently does.
Declt (pronounce "dec'let") is a reference manual generator for Common Lisp libraries. It works by loading an ASDF system and introspecting its contents. The generated documentation contains the description for the system itself and its components (modules and files), the packages defined in that system and the definitions found in those packages.
Exported and internal definitions are listed separately. This allows the reader to have a quick view on the library's public API. Within each section, definitions are sorted lexicographically.
In addition to ASDF system components and packages, Declt documents the following definitions: constants, special variables, symbol macros, macros, setf expanders, compiler macros, functions (including setf ones), generic functions and methods (including setf ones), method combinations, conditions, structures, classes and types.
The generated documentation includes every possible bit of information that introspecting can provide: documentation strings, lambda lists (including qualifiers and specializers where appropriate), slots (including type, allocation and initialization arguments), definition source file etc.
Every documented item provides a full set of cross-references to related items: ASDF component dependencies, parents and children, classes direct methods, super and subclasses, slot readers and writers, setf expanders access and update functions etc.
Finally, Declt produces exhaustive and multiple-entry indexes for every documented item.
Reference manuals are generated in Texinfo format (compatible, but not requiring Texinfo 5). From there it is possible to produce readable / printable output in info, HTML, PDF, DVI and PostScript with tools such as makeinfo, texi2dvi or texi2pdf.
The Declt reference manual is the primary example of documentation generated by Declt itself.
Comments
Great work from looking at the documentation of this documentation tool. Will for sure help to see the whole picture in many places. Thanks for all the time and congratulation!
I think that the ergonomics of declt output are questionable. I mean, it emits
officially-looking documents, alright, but.. I don't even know where to begin.
One thing I could say is that there is no single-page output version.
Another is that there appears to be too much of non-essential information.
A wholly different issue is that the output is not pretty enough by modern standards,
it's bland. The PDF version almost fatally so.
@Samium: you sound like you're expecting a user manual to be generated. Declt generates reference manuals which are a different story. If you want to use the output of Declt as a user manual for a library that doesn't provide one, perhaps you could 1/ complain to the author of the library first :-), and then start with the "Exported Definitions" chapter in the reference manual generated by Declt.
As for the easthetics of the output, there's not much I can do. I did recently use an alternate stylesheet for the HTML output. I've updated the Declt reference manual itself online with this new CSS.
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