[Mono-devel-list] monodoc provider for doc comments

[Paul Thomas]

Does a monodoc provider exist for XML documentation files created by the
/doc option of the .NET C# compiler (csc)?

(By the way, does anyone know how soon mcs will support the /doc
option, and how similar it will perform relative to the csc /doc
option?)

I know monodoc was created because the authors believed that
documentation comments were undesirable.  We have a different opinion
and plan to use documentation comments, but would still like to make our
documentation available via monodoc.  With the appropriate mondoc
provider (doccomm?), we think this can be done (roughly) as follows:

CSC = csc (msc when /doc is supported)

MyAssembly1.dll:
	$(CSC) /out:MyAssembly1.dll ...
/doc:$(DOCDIR)/MyNameSpace/MyAssembly1.doc.xml

MyAssembly2.dll:
	$(CSC) /out:MyAssembly2.dll ...
/doc:$(DOCDIR)/MyNameSpace/MyAssembly2.doc.xml

...

doc:  myproject-docs.zip myproject-docs.tree

myproject-docs.zip myproject-docs.tree:  $(DOCDIR)/*.doc.xml
$(DOCDIR)/*/*.doc.xml
	mono $(ASSEMBLER) --doccomm $(DOCDIR) -o myproject-docs

install:
	install -m 644 myproject-docs.zip myproject-docs.tree `monodoc
--get-sourcesdir`
	install -m 644 myproject-docs.source `monodoc --get-sourcesdir`

The file myproject-docs.source would contain:
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<monodoc>
  <source provider="doccomm" basefile="myproject-docs"
path="various"/>
</monodoc>

Will this work?

Does such a provider already exist?  If not, is one planned?  If so,
when?

If not, we propose to write one using the information provided in
browser/NOTES and using existing providers as examples.  Are there
additional sources of information?  Is there an experienced provider
writer out there willing to share his/her experience or advice?  How
much of an effort would you estimate writing such a provider to be
(trivial, small, medium, large, huge)?

Is there a standard for naming providers?  The current provider names
all seem to be 2-8 characters, all lower case, with no underlines or
hypens.  Is doccomm okay?

Thanks,
Paul