[JDEV] Jabber/C contributing issues, was: MIU

[maqi at jabberstudio.org]

On Thu, 4 Sep 2003, Mike Prince wrote:

> I suggest we adopt a convention and encourage new code and rewrites to
> follow it.  If this were Java, I'd say Javadoc was the way to go for at
> least method level documentation.

For example, generating some Doxygen docs from the current jabberd2 code
is done as easily as exchanging the leading "/*" by "/**" with
pre-function comments and letting run Doxygen on the whole source by a
cronjob on Jabberstudio and putting the results to the project's home
page (as it's done at jit.jabberstudio.org).

To Andrew (didn't get his posting, only saw a reply): Doxygen even
provides helpful documentation even when there are *no comments at all*.
It then generates nice highlighted HTML with hyperlinks. For understanding
and perhaps contributing, this is better than nothing. Perhaps someone
contributes proper code documentation :-).

Of course, everybody is free to code as he likes. But for my part I do not
see the benefit from the current scheme. Taking the transports as an
example again: We have several re-implementations (MSN, Yahoo, ICQ). Every
one of these transports has been or is going to be rewritten since "the
old one is crap". The "new" transports *again* lack precautions concerning
sustainability. I bet all those transports will be ditched again as soon
as the old developer ceases to support "his" transport: So let's re-invent
the wheel.

Regards