"Documentation in Builder" misinformation about Devhelp

Applications
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@chergert you wrote this blog post recently:

https://blogs.gnome.org/chergert/2024/04/06/documentation-in-builder/

It has a misinformation about the libdevhelp. You wrote:

Additionally, it didn’t handle the concept of SDKs at all. We went through great lengths in Builder to try to copy them around so libdevhelp could pick them up (with marginal success).

libdevhelp has the concept of “profile”, and a profile can be a “SDK” if you want.

A profile is just one or more directories of books, so I think you could have just created a profile for each SDK.

Also, libdevhelp clearly separates the classes that depend only on GLib, and the classes that depend on GTK 3 (although this separation is now less clear when it’s documented with gi-docgen, hum. It was well separated with GTK-Doc, with the classes regrouped into different chapters).

So when you write:

A long time ago we had Devhelp integrated in Builder.

It got lost in the GTK 4 port because there was no GTK 4 version of Devhelp.

It’s only partially true. Some non-negligible parts of Devhelp depend only on GLib and are directly re-usable.

It would be easy, almost trivial, to separate out a libdevhelp-glib.

Too late now…

PS: I write this here (with the builder tag, so the equivalent of a mailing list) because I can’t comment on the blog post.

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Additional note:

When Builder started to use the libdevhelp, the profile feature was missing. It was added later. Once the profile feature was there, Builder’s code could have been simplified (but I’ve not looked at Builder in details).