linux-kernel - Re: Improving documentation for programming interfaces

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Message-ID: <17931ddd-76ec-d342-912c-faed6084e863@metux.net>
Date:   Wed, 8 Jan 2020 13:04:31 +0100
From:   "Enrico Weigelt, metux IT consult" <lkml@...ux.net>
To:     "Theodore Y. Ts'o" <tytso@....edu>,
        Markus Elfring <Markus.Elfring@....de>
Cc:     linux-doc@...r.kernel.org, kernel-janitors@...r.kernel.org,
        LKML <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>
Subject: Re: Improving documentation for programming interfaces

On 20.12.19 16:19, Theodore Y. Ts'o wrote:

Hi folks,

> On Fri, Dec 20, 2019 at 02:30:10PM +0100, Markus Elfring wrote:
>> Linux supports some programming interfaces. Several functions are provided
>> as usual. Their application documentation is an ongoing development challenge.
>>
>> Now I would like to clarify possibilities for the specification of desired
>> information together with data types besides properties which are handled by
>> the programming language “C” so far.

@Markus:

hmm, maybe we could add some kinda-OOP-style metadata into the type
documentation ? Or maybe extend doxygen to crossref types vs functions
operating on them.

>> It seems that no customised attributes are supported at the moment.
>> Thus I imagine to specify helpful annotations as macros.

Do you mean _attribute__(...) or comments ?

<snip>

> It's unclear to me what you are requesting/proposing?  Can you be a
> bit more concrete?

@Ted:

I guess he's thinking about some kind of meta-language for expressing
common things we know from oop-world, like ctors, dtors, getters, etc.

Maybe some doxygen experts here, who could tell what we already could
extract from existing sources ?

For start, I'd like to propose a few rules:

* consistent naming of 'release' functions (AFAIK, many of them are
  already named <foo>_put()).
* for each non-trivial (non-private) object/struct, there should be
  a corresponding release function (even if it's just an alias to
  kfree()
* consistent nameing of list-type structs, so generic macros can
  be used on the struct itself (instead just a container list header
  struct)

--mtx

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Enrico Weigelt, metux IT consult
Free software and Linux embedded engineering
info@...ux.net -- +49-151-27565287