[Doxygen-develop] MacOS X doxywizard

[George Varga]

Dear All,

I would like to thank you for the Doxygen Package. I turned to be a big fan
of it in a very short time. At my company we are using it to document a
rather big project on Windows.

We have found some interesting behavior that I will address in separate
mails, but I have to create small cases for them.

This letter is about a missing piece of the package. I am a long standing
MacOS developer and as I see there is no doxywizard for MacOS X. If nobody
is working on it I would like to write one.

My goal is to deliver a real MacOS X application that could be used the
same way as the doxywizard on Windows with maybe some additional
functionallity.

I know that on UNIX people are used to make, install, run things from the
command line. On MacOS this is not the case. Apple has created a very good
cover on the UNIX underpinnings. This allows users, even developers to not
touch the terminal window for they whole life.
I would prefer to make such a cover for doxygen.
Some technical background:
Apple has created Bundles which are directories that look like files. In a
bundle you can have anything: applications, multi-file documents (like a
database, a help for something, a web site). An application bundle contains
the application and it can contain additional things that the application
needs. In the Doxygen case the Doxywizard.app would contain the wizard, the
doxygen executables (doxygen, doxytag,...), the doxygen documentation. The
installation would only require uncompressing the bundle.
A user usually would use the Doxywizard.app to do its stuff. The tools are
still available from the command line. Naturally entering
.../Doxywizard.app/Contents/bin/doxygen is not so easy therefore the
application could add symlinks to a user selected directory.
I would also prefer to add an extension to the Doxyfile. This way the
system could bind the extension to the wizard. This could be also a Good
Thing for Windows.

Please let me know if anybody else is already doing this kind of work.

Thank you
George Varga

[Jens Miltner]

Post by George Varga
Dear All,
I would like to thank you for the Doxygen Package. I turned to be a
big fan of it in a very short time. At my company we are using it to
document a rather big project on Windows.
We have found some interesting behavior that I will address in
separate mails, but I have to create small cases for them.
This letter is about a missing piece of the package. I am a long
standing MacOS developer and as I see there is no doxywizard for MacOS
X. If nobody is working on it I would like to write one.
My goal is to deliver a real MacOS X application that could be used
the same way as the doxywizard on Windows with maybe some additional
functionallity.
I know that on UNIX people are used to make, install, run things from
the command line. On MacOS this is not the case. Apple has created a
very good cover on the UNIX underpinnings. This allows users, even
developers to not touch the terminal window for they whole life.
I would prefer to make such a cover for doxygen.
Apple has created Bundles which are directories that look like files.
In a bundle you can have anything: applications, multi-file documents
(like a database, a help for something, a web site). An application
bundle contains the application and it can contain additional things
that the application needs. In the Doxygen case the Doxywizard.app
would contain the wizard, the doxygen executables (doxygen,
doxytag,...), the doxygen documentation. The installation would only
require uncompressing the bundle.
A user usually would use the Doxywizard.app to do its stuff. The tools
are still available from the command line. Naturally entering
.../Doxywizard.app/Contents/bin/doxygen is not so easy therefore the
application could add symlinks to a user selected directory.
I would also prefer to add an extension to the Doxyfile. This way the
system could bind the extension to the wizard. This could be also a
Good Thing for Windows.
Please let me know if anybody else is already doing this kind of work.

...

I've once successfully built the 'regular' doxywizard on Mac OS X (as
an X11 application) and it did work...

doxywizard uses the Qt framework, so it should be possible to built it
using the Mac OS X implementation of the Qt framework (haven't tried
yet). IIRC, there's a free Qt license for Mac OS X meanwhile when used
in OpenSource apps...
This should get you a lot of mileage towards your goal and from what I
know about the Qt framework, this should be possible without changing a
line of code. I'd rather take this approach than trying to crop up a
whole new Cocoa app, since as doxygen changes, the doxywizard needs to
be adjusted to take into account the latest configuration options. If
the end result is not satisfying, it might be possible to get a better
result by minor modifications to the doxywizard code while still using
the same codebase and Qt.

There's nothing that really prevents you from assigning an extension to
the Doxyfiles - you can always call doxygen with the explicit filename.

I think the first step would be to try and build the doxywizard against
the Mac OS X Qt libraries to see what it looks like in native Aqua look
and whether this is acceptable. Once this is done, the next steps like
packaging could be tackled...

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