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Tuesday, May 10 2022

Declt 4.0 beta 1 "William Riker" is released

Today, after two years and a half of (irregular) development, and 465 commits, I have released the first beta version of Declt 4.0, my reference manual generator for Common Lisp libraries.

I seldom release official beta versions of software, let alone make announcements about them, but this one deserves an exception. Since version 3, Declt has been undergoing a massive, SOC-oriented, overhaul. The intent is to reimplement it into a clean 3-stages pipeline. Stage one, the "assessment" stage is in charge of gathering information. Stage two, the "assembly" stage, creates a documentation template specifying how the information is to be organized. Finally, Stage three, the "typesetting" stage, renders the template in a specific output format. Of course, the purpose is to eventually be able to support different kinds of templates and output formats.

Declt 4.0b1 marks the achievement of Stage one, which is now complete. It also contains a lot of new (and long awaited) features and improvements. The user manual has been updated to provide an overview of the new architecture, along with some details about Stage one of the pipeline. From now on, I'm also going to release new versions of Quickref to closely follow the evolution of Declt.

Apart from the aforementioned architecture overhaul, which really boils down to internals shaking and shouldn't affect the end-user much, a lot of new features and improvements are also provided in this release. They are listed below.

Backward Incompatible Changes

For the benefit of Separation of Concerns, but also for other reasons, a number of keyword arguments to the declt function have been renamed. :hyperlinks becomes :locations, :version becomes :library-version, :texi-directory becomes :output-directory, and :texi-name becomes :file-name.

New Features

Default / Standard Values

Declt now has the ability to advertise or hide properties that get default / standard values (e.g. standard method combination, :instance slot allocation, etc.).

Support for Aliases

Declt now recognizes and advertises "aliases", that is, funcoids which have their fdefinition, macro, or compiler macro function set manually to another, original, definition.

Support for New Programmatic Entities

Typed structures and setf compiler macros are now properly detected and documented with all the specific information.

Proper Support for Uninterened Symbols

Such symbols may be encountered on several occasions such as slot names (trivialib, for example, defines structures with uninterned slot names in order to prevent access to them). Definitions named with uninterned symbols are considered private, and denoted by the empty set package (∅).

SBCL 2.1.2 Required

The following enhancements depend on it:

  • short form setf expanders now get correct source information,
  • method combinations lambda-lists are now documented.

Domestic vs. Foreign Definitions

The concept of domestic (as opposed to foreign) definition has been extended to include those created in one of the sources files of the library being documented, even if the symbol naming the definition is from a foreign package. If the source file is unknown, then the symbol's package must be domestic. The general intent is to consider language extensions as domestic, hence, always documented. For example, a new method on a standard generic function (say, initialize-instance) will now always appear in the documentation.

This refinement is accompanied by a new option allowing to include foreign definitions in the generated documentation. Of course, only foreign definitions somehow related to the library being documented will appear in the documentation. Also, those definitions will in general be partial: only the parts relevant to the library being documented will appear. Continuing with the initialize-instance example, new methods normally appear as toplevel, standalone definitions in the documentation (and their parent generic function is simply mentioned). If foreign definitions are included however, there will be a toplevel entry for the generic function, and all methods defined in the library will be documented there (truly foreign methods won't appear at all).

Introspection Heuristic

Until now, there was a single heuristic for finding domestic definitions, which was to start from domestic packages and scan as many connections between symbols as possible. That heuristic is reasonably fast, but may occasionally miss some domestic definitions. Declt now has the ability to scan all symbols in the Lisp image instead of only the ones from domestic packages. This new option ensures that all domestic definitions are found, at the expense of a much greater computation time.

Supported Licenses

The Microsoft Public License has been added.

Info Installation Category

In other words, the value of Texinfo's @direntry command is now customizable (instead to being hardwired to "Common Lisp").

Improvements

Documentation Thinning

Packages reference lists do not point to methods directly anymore (as they can be reached via the generic function's reference). Also, only slots for which the parent classoid is named from another package are now referenced.

Files reference lists do not point to slots anymore (as they can be reached via the parent classoid's reference). Also, only methods for which the parent generic function is defined in another file are now referenced.

The readability of long references has been improved. In particular, they don't advertise the type of the referenced definitions anymore, when there is no ambiguity.

Slot documentation now advertises the slot name's package only when different from that of the parent classoid.

Non standalone method documentation now advertises the source file only when different from that of the parent generic function.

The rendering of EQL specializers has been inmproved.

The documentation of setf / writer methods doesn't render the "new value" argument / specializer anymore.

Merging

Generic definitions containing only reader / writer methods are upgraded to specific reader / writer categories, and definition merging is now only attempted on those.

Lambda Lists

Uninformative parts of lambda lists are now filtered out. This includes &whole, &environment, &aux variables, along with options / keyword variables and default values.

Method specializers in lambda lists now link back to their respective class definitions.

Method Combinations

The method combination discovery scheme has been upgraded to benefit from SBCL 1.4.8's enhancements (themselves following my ELS 2018 paper). The old code didn't break, but prevented unused method combinations from being detected.

Bug Fixes and Workarounds

ASDF

Better handling of missing / unloaded components or dependencies (this can happen for instance with feature-dependent conditional inclusion).

Cope with the lack of specification of the license information in ASDF systems by coercing to a string.

Fix several cases of system files documentation duplication. Declt automatically documents .asd files as special cases of Lisp files. However, some systems have the bad (IMHO) habit of mentioning them explicitly as components (e.g. static files). When this happens, Declt silently discards that definition and keeps its own (at the expense of having a slightly incorrect system documentation).

Anchoring

After years of vain attempts at providing human-readable yet unique anchor names (which was only really useful for Info, BTW), I finally got rid of my last bit of idealism. Anchor names now use numerical definition UIDs, and since Texinfo allows me to expand references with some more information than just the anchor, it's good enough. Besides, it fixes the last remaining rare cases exhibiting the fact that it's just impossible to have anchors that are both human-readable and unique.

Setf Expanders

Fix the computation of short form setf epxander lambda lists (which didn't correctly handle the presence of optional or rest arguments before.

Handle the potential unavailability of a setf expander's update function or short form operator. Document it if applicable. Also signal a warning when the expander is domestic.

Tuesday, November 19 2019

Declt 3.0 "Montgomery Scott" is released

I'm pleased to announce the release of Declt 3.0 "Montgomery Scott", my Texinfo reference manual generator for Common Lisp libraries.

This is a new major release of the library, although the changes may not be so visible from the outside. The main concern in this release has been to increase the robustness of the output, from three different angles.

  1. Many places from where Declt attempts to extract meaningful information are underspecified (ASDF system slots notably).
  2. The pretty-printing of Lisp items can be difficult, given the liberalism and extensibility of the language.
  3. Finally, several restrictions in the syntax of Texinfo itself (anchor names notably) get in the way.

These issues were described in a paper presented at the TeX Users Group conference, this summer in Palo Alto. This release goes a long way toward fixing them.

The new generated reference manuals look mostly the same as before, but some important things have changed under the hood, notably the names of hyperlinks and cross-references (backward-incompatible, hence the increase in the major version number). The output is now also much more robust with respect to the final output format: the generation of HTML, DVI, Postscript, PDF, and even plain Info should work fine and has been tested on all Quicklisp libraries (in fact, Quickref will also be upgraded in the near future to provide all those formats at once).

Those improvements do come at a cost. Unicode is now required (even for Info readers). To be honest, many Lisp libraries already had that implicit requirement. Also, this release depends on improvements and bug fixes only available in Texinfo 6.7, now a requirement as well. I have to thank Gavin Smith, from the Texinfo team, for his collaboration.

Apart from that, this release also has a number of bug fixes.

  • Some method specializers were not handled properly.
  • The manuals were missing documentation for some non-Lisp source files.
  • There were some glitches in the pretty-printing of unreadable objects.

Get it at the usual place, and enjoy!

Monday, April 8 2019

Quickref 2.0 "Be Quick or Be Dead" is released

Surfing on the energizing wave of ELS 2019, the 12 European Lisp Symposium, I'm happy to announce the release of Quickref 2.0, codename "Be Quick or Be Dead".

The major improvement in this release, justifying an increment of the major version number (and the very appropriate codename), is the introduction of parallel algorithms for building the documentation. I presented this work last week in Genova so I won't go into the gory details here, but for the brave and impatient, let me just say that using the parallel implementation is just a matter of calling the BUILD function with :parallel t :declt-threads x :makeinfo-threads y (adjust x and y as you see fit, depending on your architecture).

The second featured improvement is the introduction of an author index, in addition to the original one. The author index is still a bit shaky, mostly due to technical problems (calling asdf:find-system almost two thousand times simply doesn't work) and also to the very creative use that some library authors have of the ASDF author and maintainer slots in the system descriptions. It does, however, a quite decent job for the majority of the authors and their libraries'reference manuals.

Finally, the repository now has a fully functional continuous integration infrastructure, which means that there shouldn't be anymore lags between new Quicklisp (or Quickref) releases and new versions of the documentation website.

Thanks to Antoine Hacquard, Antoine Martin, and Erik Huelsmann for their contribution to this release! A lot of new features are already in the pipe. Currently documenting 1720 libraries, and counting...

Tuesday, August 7 2018

Quickref open-sourced

8 months after the original announcement, we finally open-sourced Quickref. The complete source code is available here.

I gave a lightning talk at ELS 2018, in which I claimed I would release the code in "something like two weeks". That was 4 months ago :-). I apologize for the delay, especially to Zach who expressed interest in how we did the Docker thing at the time. I wanted to clean up the code before the first public release (I'm a maniac like that), which I did, but it took some time.

Compared to what I announced at ELS, Quickref also has a couple of new features, most importantly the ability to generate documentation for only what's already installed, rather than for the whole Quicklisp world. This can be very convenient if you just want some local documentation for the things you use daily. Finally, there is also a very rudimentary support for multithreading, which currently doesn't bring much. But the code has been prepared for going further in that direction; this will be the topic of another internship which will start next September.

Browse no less than 1588 reference manuals right now at https://quickref.common-lisp.net/, and recreate your own local version with this Docker 2-liner:

docker run --name quickref quickref/quickref
docker cp quickref:/home/quickref/quickref .

Wednesday, December 13 2017

Announcing Quickref: a global documentation project for Common Lisp

Today, we deployed the first version of Quickref, a new global documentation project for Common Lisp.

The purpose of Quickref is to provide a centralized collection of reference manuals for the whole Quicklisp world. This means around 1500 libraries, for a total of around 3000 ASDF systems. The reference manuals are generated by Declt, which is probably the most complete documentation system for Common Lisp currently available, and delivered in HTML (PDF versions could easily be made available as well).

A lot of things can still be improved, but I'm pretty satisfied with the result so far. 3000 ASDF systems is a hell of a test suite for Declt, and I'm happy to report that it passes on practically all of them. Only a couple of issues remain, not even due to Declt itself, and less than a dozen or so libraries still pose problems (mostly technical difficulties due to foreign dependencies).

Quickref was made by Antoine Martin, as part of an internship with me. Many thanks to him! We still have some cleanup and packaging to do, but we expect to open-source the infrastructure soon. I also want to thank Mark Evenson, Erik Huelsmann and the Common Lisp Foundation for hosting the project on common-lisp.net (it was only natural)!

Finally, let me restate this again (and again): reference manuals are not user manuals. They are... reference manuals. Although automatically generated, there are some things you can do, as a library author, to improve the output (this is an area of Declt which I intend to work on in the future). Please refer to the Declt user manual (notably section 3.2 Coding Style) for more information.

Monday, October 16 2017

Declt 2.3 "Robert April" is out

I'm happy to announce the release of Declt 2.3. Declt is my reference manual generator for Common Lisp libraries.

The improvements and bug fixes in the last two releases are the result of running Declt against the whole Quicklisp world (around 3000 ASDF systems for 1500 libraries). See this post for more information.

New in this release:

  • Advertise file extensions in references.
  • Advertise the type of foreign definitions.
  • More robust display and indexing of, and with, lambda-lists.
  • Use UTF8 special characters to denote invisble ones.
  • More robust support for Texinfo brace escaping.
  • Handle modules sharing the same location.
  • Ensure output is done with standard IO syntax.
  • Fix potential duplication of some (non-lisp) files and document all static files.
  • Fix potential duplication of packages documentation.

From the 2.2 "Christopher Pike" release (not previously advertised):

  • Require a UTF-8 environment.
  • Understand ASDF's notion of inferred system, and also be more protective against ASDF extensions.
  • Support for improper lambda lists (e.g. destructuring ones).
  • Improve contact defaulting code.
  • Update support for SBCL's setf expanders introspection.
  • Accept ASDF system designators.
  • Various bug fixes in the areas of method combinations, accessor definition merging and setf expanders.

Find it at the usual place...

Tuesday, February 28 2017

Declt 2.1 "Jonathan Archer" is out

I'm happy to announce the release of Declt 2.1 "Jonathan Archer".

New in this release:

  • Handle recent change in SBCL's SB-INT:INFO API.
  • Handle list of contacts (strings) in ASDF systems author and maintainer slots.
  • Some backward-incompatible changes in the keyword arguments to the DECLT function.
  • More hyperlinks between systems and source files.
  • More robust system's packages collection (no more code walking).
  • More robust handling of unavailable ASDF components.
  • More robust naming of cross-references.

Find it at the usual place...

Wednesday, November 4 2015

Declt 2.0.1 "Benjamin Sisko" is out

Declt 2.0.1 "Benjamin Sisko" is out. This is a bugfix release with one internal change (a special variable was not following the earmuffs convention) and one actual bugfix (the same Texinfo anchor was generated for symbols with the same name but in different packages).

Find it at the usual place...

Monday, July 13 2015

Declt 2.0 is out -- IMPORTANT

Declt 2.0 "Kathryn Janeway" is out. This release doesn't contain any change in functionality, yet deserves a major version upgrade since it contains 3 important changes: an infrastructure revamp (along the lines of what Clon endured not so long ago), a license switch from the GNU GPL to a BSD one, and finally a system / package name change. The prefix is now net.didierverna instead of com.dvlsoft. Do I need to apologize for this again? :-)

Find it at the usual place...

Monday, June 29 2015

Declt 1.1 is released

Hello,

as promised last week, I've just released a new version of Declt, my reference manual generator for ASDF systems. This new version (1.1) is now able to document Clon again (the documentation of which has been updated on the website).

New in this release:

  • Declt now properly handles and documents complex system and component dependencies, such as :feature :require and :version statements,
  • Declt also documents a system's :if-feature if any.

But the most important addition is the ability to document several ASDF systems in the same reference manual. More precisely, Declt now documents not only the main system but also all its subsystems. A subsystem is defined as a system on which the main one depends on in any way, and which is also part of the same distribution (under the same directory tree). Declt also understands multiple system definitions from the same .asd file.

Enjoy!

Thursday, June 25 2015

Clon 1.0b24 is released -- IMPORTANT

Hello,

I'm happy to announce the release of the next beta version of Clon, the Common Lisp / Command Line Options Nuker library. This release doesn't contain much change in terms of functionality, but it contains a lot of change in terms of infrastructure, plus very important and backward-incompatible modifications. So if you're a Clon user, please read on.

First of all, a huge revamp of the library's infrastructure (package hierarchy, ASDF and Make implementations) occurred. A large portion of this work is actually not mine, but Fare's (big thanks to him, 'cause the level of ASDF expertise required just means that I couldn't have done that by myself). The purpose here was twofold: first, remove all logic from the ASDF files (so that other system managers could be used; not sure that's actually useful right now) and second, split the library in two: the core, basic functionality and the non-standard platform-dependent bells and whistles (read: termio support). The result is that Clon now comes with 4 different ASDF systems! A setup system allows you to configure some stuff prior to loading the library, a core system allows you to load only the basic functionality and the regular one loads everything, autodetecting platform-dependent features as before. The fourth system is auxiliary and not to be used by hand. All of this is properly documented. For a code maniac like me, this new infrastructure is much more satisfactory, and I've learned a lot about ASDF less known features.

Next, I've moved the repository to Github. Please update your links! It seems that I've lost all my former tags in the process, but oh well...Only the Git repo has moved. The main Clon web page still contains the full history of tarballs, the preformatted documentation, and will continue to do so in the future.

Finally (I've kept this to myself until the last possible minute because I'm scared like hell to tell): I've changed the systems and packages names... The com.dvlsoft prefix has been replaced with net.didierverna. All other libraries of mine will eventually endure the same surgery. It's for the best, I apologize for it and I swear I will never ever do that again, EVER (fingers crossed behind my back).

So what's next? Before considering an official 1.0 release, there are two things that I want to do. First, cleanup some remaining Fixmes and some shaky error handling. Second, provide an even simpler way of using Clon than what the Quick Start chapter in the doc demonstrates. The idea is to just implement a main function with keyword arguments, and those argument magically become command-line options.

A side-effect of this work is that Declt now chokes on Clon, because some ASDF features that it doesn't understand are in use. So Declt has a couple of new challenges ahead, and you should expect a new release in the weeks to come.

Saturday, August 24 2013

Declt 1.0 is out

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.

Friday, August 16 2013

Lisp Corner Cases: Method Combinations

In the process of writing Declt, I had to deepen my knowledge of some Lisp corner cases, notably in the area of introspection. As you know, Lisp has in fact more than 2 namespaces. Sometimes, introspecting a potential symbol definition in one namespace is trivial. COMPILER-MACRO-FUNCTION is one example. The "functional" namespace is heterogeneous but you can still make your way out of macros, regular or generic functions very easily. In the same vein, distinguishing constants, special variables and symbol macros in the "variables" namespace is more complicated because there is no standard way to access that information, but with the help of some vendor-specific machinery (e.g. SB-INT:INFO), it's still doable.

At some point, I tackled the case of method combinations, and to my greatest surprise, found out that introspecting a method combination by name is not simple. In fact, it's not even doable. The reason is that method combinations don't have a namespace proper. Let me explain why.

You define a new method combination of some NAME with DEFINE-METHOD-COMBINATION, and you use it with the :METHOD-COMBINATION option to DEFGENERIC. But how do you introspect a NAME for a potential method combination definition? Well, you can't do exactly that. First, there is no standard way to do so. Next, let's look at what the MOP provides. One would expect something along the lines of FIND-CLASS...

There is indeed something called FIND-METHOD-COMBINATION, but either I'm missing something, or it is really, and I mean really badly designed. The arguments to this function are: a generic function meta-object, a method combination name and some method combination options. So if this function is supposed to be the equivalent of FIND-CLASS for method combinations, what in the hell are the 1st and 3rd arguments for? In fact, it's not supposed to do what its name suggests. According to the AMOP, p.191, the purpose of this function is to "determine the method combination object used by a generic function". In practice however (at least in SBCL), it's not doing that either (see below), and anyway, determining the method combination object used by a generic function is better achieved by using the GENERIC-FUNCTION-METHOD-COMBINATION accessor.

So this protocol doesn't seem to make any sense. In order to understand what to make of all this, I looked at how SBCL handles method combinations (I don't know what other vendors do) and here is what I found. When you call DEFINE-METHOD-COMBINATION for some NAME, SBCL creates a new method for FIND-METHOD-COMBINATION, eql-specialized on that NAME. This method is encapsulated in a closure containing the method combination's definition, ignores its first argument (the generic function meta-object; that's why I said that it's not really doing what the AMOP says it does), recreates and returns a new method combination object on the fly every time it is called.

This has several consequences. First, the notion of "method combination named NAME" doesn't really make sense. Method combinations don't have a proper namespace. Every time you create a new generic function, the method combination essentially becomes local to that function. Redefining a method combination has no effect on existing generic functions using a method combination of the same NAME. To put it differently, you can end up with several generic functions using different yet equally named method combinations.

In Declt, I'm now assuming that programmers behave and only define method combinations once. Which brings us to the second consequence. With that assumption in mind, the "proper" way to introspect a NAME for a method combination definition (at least in SBCL) is to first look for the existence of a FIND-METHOD-COMBINATION method eql-specialized on that NAME, and then call it to retrieve the actual definition.

I haven't thought about it a lot yet, but it would be interesting to investigate the idea of cleaning this up a bit. I mean, establishing a real global namespace for method combinations, creating an alternate FIND-METHOD-COMBINATION protocol more along the lines of FIND-CLASS. And then, it could also be interesting to investigate on the potential applications of allowing method combination redefinition to affect live generic functions, just like class redefinition affects live instances...

Tuesday, October 23 2012

Declt 1.0b15 "Kyoto" is out

This is Declt 1.0b15, the "Kyoto" release... Declt is a reference manual generator for Common Lisp libraries.

This version underwent a major internals overhaul, required by some of the new features described below:

  • Packages sections now advertise all definitions instead of just the symbols naming them. They also advertise their use-list and used-by-list, with cross-references.
  • Conditions, structures and classes now advertise their sub- and super-classes, direct methods, initargs and slots, with cross-references.
  • Slots documentation include docstring, type, initargs, initforms, readers and writers with cross-references.
  • Declt now documents symbol macros and compiler macros.
  • The *LINK-FILES* special is gone (M-x all-hail-purely-functional-style).
  • All ASDF components now advertise their descriptions and long descriptions, if any.
  • Docstrings are displayed in a more reader-friendly fashion.
  • Documentation entries for methods are nested within the corresponding generic function entry.

Grab it at the usual place.

Tuesday, September 25 2012

Declt 1.0b14 is out

I've just released a new version of Declt, my reference manual generator for ASDF systems.

This release containts some improvements based on Sabra Crolleton's feedback. The most notable improvements are support for two new license types (MIT and LGPL), a new :DECLT-NOTICE keyword argument that gives you control on the "automatically generated by Declt" notice that appears in the reference manuals, and a bug fix (missing support for empty lists in lambda-lists).

Grab it at the usual place.

Monday, June 4 2012

Declt 1.0b13 is out

I've just released a new version of Declt, my reference manual generator for ASDF systems. This release includes some uninteresting internals update, plus an important bug fix: there were two calls to FIND-METHOD missing an ERRORP flag set to nil, leading to Declt throwing an error where it shouldn't have.

Grab it at the usual place.

Wednesday, June 29 2011

Declt 1.0b12 is out

I've just released the next version of Declt, my reference manual generator for ASDF systems.

This release includes some fixes for the Info format target but most notably, support for documenting (generic) writer functions and methods. When it makes sense, the documentations for func and (setf func) are grouped together. Getting closer to an official 1.0 stable version...

Grab it here, and enjoy!

Tuesday, May 31 2011

Declt 1.0b11 is out

I've just released a new version of Declt, my Texinfo reference manual generator for ASDF systems. This release contains only one bugfix: when trying to create links to source files, Declt now checks whether the files actually exist or not.

Tracking this bug down had the side-effect of exhibiting a misfeature of SBCL's introspection facility: the COPY-<struct> functions (automatically generated by defstruct calls) have their definition source set to target-defstruct.lisp which is an SBCL source file. It would make more sense to set it to the file containing the defstruct call instead, as is already the case for constructors, predicates and accessor functions. Patch sent to the SBCL developers.

Wednesday, February 23 2011

Declt 1.0b9 is out

The next edition of Declt, the Documentation Extractor from Common Lisp to Texinfo, is out. In this release:

  • Bugfix: rendering the documentation for methods with EQL specializers didn't work.
  • Feature: licensing and copyrighting the reference manual is now optional. Licenses currently supported are BSD and GPL.
  • Declt now generates its own reference manual by default.
  • Some package infrastructure changes that should remain transparent.

Grab it here

Happy documenting!

Tuesday, September 21 2010

Declt version 1.0b1 - first public release

Hello,

I'm happy to announce the first public release of Declt.

Declt (pronounce dec'let) is a reference manual generator for Common Lisp. It extracts and formats documentation from ASDF systems, including the system itself and its components, the packages defined in the system and definitions like constants, special variables, macros, functions, generic functions and methods, conditions, structures and classes.

Reference manuals are generated in Texinfo format which can be subsequently converted into info, HTML, DVI, PostScript or PDF. The generated manuals are fully indexed and provide a complete set of cross-references between documentation elements. For instance, files and packages point to the definitions they provide, and those definitions point back to package and file in which they can be found.


Get it at:
http://www.lrde.epita.fr/~didier/softwa ... .php#declt


Declt requires SBCL to work (if you're interested in porting it, grep
PORTME in the sources). Also, ASDF 2 has not been tested yet.
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Copyright (C) 2008 -- 2018 Didier Verna didier@lrde.epita.fr