[CMake] Automatically updating Doxygen documentation and making it readily available to users with CMake

[Timothy Wrona]

Perhaps there is a standard location to "install" the documentation when
running the install command for a project?

Either way having it as an "index.html" file somewhere on the hard-disk is
not very intuitive. It would make much more sense for it to be on a web
server where you can access it with a sensible URL.

On Thu, Feb 21, 2019 at 1:44 AM Alan W. Irwin <Alan.W.Irwin1234 at gmail.com>
wrote:

> On 2019-02-20 17:52-0500 Timothy Wrona wrote:
>
> > I have worked on multiple C++ libraries that are built with CMake and run
> > Doxygen to generate HTML documentation. In every one of these libraries,
> > the documentation get's built into an "html" folder in the CMake "build"
> > directory and never gets looked at by anyone.
> >
> > *Because let's be honest, most people don't like to read documentation at
> > all - let alone search for it.*
> >
> > This leads to a few questions:
> >
> >   1.
> >
> >   Is there a standard location to put the documentation once it is built
> >   where it makes it very clear to the users of a library that
> documentation
> >   is available for a library?
> >   2.
> >
> >   How can I ensure that every time my library is built, the documentation
> >   will be *automatically *updated and placed in this standard location?
> >   3.
> >
> >   Is there any standard way to keep past versions of documentation for
> >   reference in case someone is using an earlier version of the library?
> >
> > I have also posted this question on stack overflow. If you would like,
> you
> > can answer there instead because it may help a wider audience:
> >
> https://stackoverflow.com/questions/54796513/automatically-updating-doxygen-documentation-and-making-it-readily-available-to
>
> I am not aware of any standard responses to your 3 questions above.
>
> What I do for a couple of my projects that have doxygen-generated
> documentation is I have a special custom command/target that copies
> the doxygen-generated documentation from the build tree back to a
> special directory in the source tree, and I only invoke that target if
> I am creating a source tarball.  And similarly for DocBook-generated
> documentation.  Furthermore, I configure my VCS in each case to ignore
> those generated directories in the source tree so there are no VCS
> complications, yet tarball users get a chance to access the generated
> documentation.
>
> Of course, if someone here has a better or more standardized scheme, I
> would like to hear it.
>
> Alan
> __________________________
> Alan W. Irwin
>
> Programming affiliations with the FreeEOS equation-of-state
> implementation for stellar interiors (freeeos.sf.net); the Time
> Ephemerides project (timeephem.sf.net); PLplot scientific plotting
> software package (plplot.sf.net); the libLASi project
> (unifont.org/lasi); the Loads of Linux Links project (loll.sf.net);
> and the Linux Brochure Project (lbproject.sf.net).
> __________________________
>
> Linux-powered Science
> __________________________
>
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