doxygen Notes (was: Re: Moving on from Cygwin)

[David Stacey]

On 27/06/18 11:14, Michael Wild wrote:
> For me the following orphaned packages are of importance (not all of
> them David's):
>
> * doxygen
>
> If nobody else steps up, I can adopt one or the other.

Some notes on 'doxygen' that might help you (or someone else) maintain 
the package:

doxygen is split into two packages: the main programme in 'doxygen', and 
the 'doxywizard' GUI in 'doxygen-doxywizard'. It GUI icon used for 
doxywizard is borrowed from the Fedora package and is part of kdesdk.

New doxygen releases are put out upstream once or twice a year (pay 
attention around Christmas Day!) [1]. Between releases, it's worth 
checking the patches that get applied to doxygen in a major distro, e.g 
[2], and pick up any that you feel are important.

Doxygen has it's own C++ parser, which is quite 'loose' in its 
understanding of C++. It's generally OK, but I've tripped it up in the 
past with some complex template specialisation. Thankfully, doxygen can 
be built to use clang for its parsing (although you have to explicitly 
enable this in your doxygen file [3]). I build doxygen in this way to 
give users the option of a 'better' C++ parser should they need it 
(although I'm not aware of any major distro doing likewise).

Doxygen has an experimental feature to store its internal data in an 
sqlite3 database. This is turned off, and I'm not aware of any major 
distro enabling this feature.

Doxygen fails to compile under 64-bit Cygwin with the default CFLAGS and 
CXXFLAGS as populated by cygport. The compilation fails in the assembler 
with 'too many sections'. The solution is to suppress the generation of 
the 'debuginfo' package for 64-bit, and then the compilation completes 
successfully. This doesn't affect 32-bit Cygwin, where a 'debuginfo' 
package is generated.

Hope that helps,

Dave.

[1] - http://doxygen.org/manual/changelog.html
[2] - https://src.fedoraproject.org/cgit/rpms/doxygen.git/tree/
[3] - http://doxygen.org/manual/config.html#cfg_clang_assisted_parsing