*mm documentation on library.gnome.org

We’ve finally moved the API documentation for gtkmm and the other C++ bindings to library.gnome.org’s C++ Reference section. These are all created with Doxygen. Using library.gnome.org means that it’s updated every time we do a tarball release and we don’t lose old versions when it’s updated. We also have both the stable (on distros) and unstable (in progress) API documentation available.

We’ve also moved the gtkmm book, libsigc++ manual, and libxml++ tutorial to the Guides section. These all use DocBook XML.

library.gnome.org is a wonderful system, giving developers what they need, thanks to Frederic Peters’ hard work and responsiveness. I like it so much that Openismus might soon offer to set up library instances for other projects or companies.

Main Pages

Moving the API documentation to library.gnome.org made it obvious that we needed proper introductory text for each module. So each one now lists:

• What it is
• Where in the API to start looking, with links
• How to #include the headers
• How to get the include and linker flags with pkg-config

For instance, see the glibmm API reference’s main page.  I regularly complain that non-GNOME libraries don’t provide clues about what include or linker flags should be used, or how to include them, let alone API documentation, causing application builds to be inconsistent and fragile. It’s the least that should be done, so it’s good that I can now point to something consistent.

Lingering Problems

There are some small problems still to work out:

• gtkmm’s stable/ page shows the unstable 2.90 releases
• libxml++’s main page isn’t showing in library.gnome.org
• libvtemm’s main page isn’t showing in library.gnome.org
• gtksourceviewmm (and probably others) needs library.gnome.org’s server to have Python 2.6
• gtkglextmm doesn’t have a main page yet