GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 163033
Usability issues caused by single detailed comment requirement
Last modified: 2018-07-30 10:33:48 UTC
Doxygen supports only one detailed comment per object (function, struct, etc). This causes some serious usability issues. For instance, we (my workplace) use a detailed comment describing all functions in each of our header files. But we would also like to be able to sprinkle \todo commands within the source, near the line(s) that needs work. But this causes Doxygen to drop the entire previous detailed comment. Of course, we can work around this by always putting the \todo commands in the header file. But that is clearly not how that command is intended to work. As another example, we would like to break function documentation into two pieces. First, public documentation for external consumption by customers (in the header files). And second, internal documentation for ourselves, in the source files, controlled by \if-\endif commands. But this cannot be done because of this restriction. There are other special commands that also make sense to separate from the main detailed comment, such as \note. Although it may make perfect logical sense to require a single detailed comment, in practice it is a rather user-hostile requirement. Coming from the point of view of a user rather than the author of Doxygen, this restriction simply doesn't make sense. We view it as the single real issue with Doxygen. Fixing this would greatly improve the flexibility of Doxygen, in ways that would be hard to compare with other new features. The attached example files demonstrate how we would expect Doxygen to work. The .h file contains a function that has a \brief command and some public information about the function. The .c file contains more internal-type documentation of the function. Of course, when you generate the documentation, only the comments in the source file are applied. We would expect everything in the source file to be appended after that in the header files. Thanks.
Created attachment 35488 [details] doxytest.zip Contains a .c, .h, and Doxyfile showing problems caused by the single detailed comment requirement.
This bug's version was set to "latest". Since this is a moving target, I changed it to 1.5.3-SVN. If you believe this has already been fixed, then please change the status accordingly.
As discussed in https://github.com/doxygen/doxygen/pull/734 , Doxygen has moved its issue tracking to https://github.com/doxygen/doxygen/issues All Doxygen tickets in GNOME Bugzilla have been migrated to Github. You can subscribe and participate in the new ticket in Github. You can find the corresponding Github ticket by searching for its Bugzilla ID (number) in Github. Hence I am closing this GNOME Bugzilla ticket. Please use the corresponding ticket in Github instead. Thanks a lot!