clel wrote: ↑Mon Dec 02, 2019 1:06 pm
Sad to hear that. 5GB sounds rather big, much bigger than the FreeCAD program itself which contains documentation through the console. Do you have a source for that?
The incompleteness should probably better be mentioned on the API page. I expected a complete API. Regarding hosting I am rather sure there are many sites where you can host that for free. Uploading can probably also be automated. So I really hope that can be done to have a useable API available.
Source for what? The documentation being large? Just compile it yourself as stated in
Source documentation, and then check the size.
Source documentation wrote:The DevDoc target will generate a significant amount of data, around 5 GB of new files, particularly due to the diagrams created by Graphviz.
An alternative, smaller version of the documentation which takes only around 600 MB can be generated with a different target. This is the version displayed on the FreeCAD API website.
Doxygen generates a ton of diagrams, around 15 thousand maybe, to show the relationships between all classes in the source code.
If you know how to get that free hosting, and how to automatically generate the documentation, and upload it online, then you are welcome to demonstrate that, donate such hosting space, hosting money, or whatever else is needed to improve the documentation. We don't have all this figured out. The core developers are busy doing their own things, and the rest of us, the volunteers, do what we can, but we are still shorthanded to look into every detail.
For example, qingfeng (CFD developer) decided to host the documentation himself,
FreeCAD 0.19 development. I don't know if he keeps it up to date or has made improvements. Probably this should be centrally managed by the FreeCAD community and not left to one member.
This is what one lead developer says
yorik wrote: ↑Fri Oct 26, 2018 2:09 pm
... On the other hand, we have the doxygen auto-generated pages at
http://www.freecadweb.org/api which are more complete (although there is a long time I didn't update them either

) but are much less friendly to read...
We should really spend some effort in making better API docs somehow.. I wonder if there isn't some online service a la travis that could build the doxygen docs automatically and place them online for us...
So far it seems the core developers have managed without a complete online API because they understand the code quite well, and as long as you have downloaded the code from Git, you can always compile the documentation locally. I do agree, however, that the full online API is useful for newcomers and new programmers who would like to join the developing effort. I try my best to improve the documentation but it is still a titanic task.
Fixing Doxygen Module descriptions