2006-03-21 10:12:30

by Guillermo López Alejos

[permalink] [raw]
Subject: Introducting LXD

Dear Linux developers,

I am student of Computer Sciences at University Carlos III of Madrid
(Spain). I worked before in a project related with the Linux kernel,
analyzing the integration of the parallel file system expand into the
Linux kernel.

Actually, I am developing LXD as my final year project. LXD, based on
the LXR project, intends to be a documentation system for large source
projects. Its main objective is to gather high level information that
cannot be extracted from the source files. LXD is registered at
SourceForge.net (http://sourceforge.net/projects/lxd/). A detailed
presentation for the LXD project can be found at
http://lxd.sourceforge.net/.

It is of my interest to analyze the user requirements for LXD. I will
appreciate very much any comment about LXD, especially those regarding
the expected system usage. There is a mailing list available at
http://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/lxd-devel for those
interested in discussing LXD capabilities.

Thank you for your time and regards,

--
Guillermo


2006-03-21 23:15:42

by Sam Vilain

[permalink] [raw]
Subject: Re: Introducting LXD

Guillermo López Alejos wrote:

>Dear Linux developers,
>
>I am student of Computer Sciences at University Carlos III of Madrid
>(Spain). I worked before in a project related with the Linux kernel,
>analyzing the integration of the parallel file system expand into the
>Linux kernel.
>
>Actually, I am developing LXD as my final year project. LXD, based on
>the LXR project, intends to be a documentation system for large source
>projects. Its main objective is to gather high level information that
>cannot be extracted from the source files. LXD is registered at
>SourceForge.net (http://sourceforge.net/projects/lxd/). A detailed
>presentation for the LXD project can be found at
>http://lxd.sourceforge.net/.
>
>It is of my interest to analyze the user requirements for LXD. I will
>appreciate very much any comment about LXD, especially those regarding
>the expected system usage. There is a mailing list available at
>http://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/lxd-devel for those
>interested in discussing LXD capabilities.
>
>

Sounds very generic, I'd say a lot of software fits into this category.
Perhaps you'd like to list a few of the novel things that you attempt to
achieve, and the scope of your problem set. Is this just C code?

Yes, I could follow the link, but there was nothing really there in your
post to make me want to bite.

Sam.

2006-03-22 10:45:48

by Guillermo López Alejos

[permalink] [raw]
Subject: Re: Introducting LXD

> Yes, I could follow the link, but there was nothing really there in your
> post to make me want to bite.

O.K., I'll try to show some of the interesting aspects of LXD.

LXD intends to be a documentation system for large open source
projects. Its main objective is to gather high level information that
cannot be extracted from the source files.

The main strengths of LXD are:
* Documentation is separated from source files:
- High level information usually does not fit in a unique
source file (e.g.
subsystem description).
- Source code is more readable without big blocks of comments.

* Documentation files have a well defined XML structure.
- Provides developers a clear view of what has to be documented and how.
- Documentation can be edited using standard XML editors.
- It can be obtained lots of human readable documentation
formats (LaTeX, HTML, ...)
from XML documents.
- Documentation can be independent from programming language.

My initial idea of LXD is a system composed by the XML documents
definitions and a set of tools to ease the management of XML
documentation. To simplify the problem, the first approach will be
focused on projects written in C language. As I said in my previous
post, there is a presentation of the project at
http://lxd.sourceforge.net/.

The main aspects that I expect to discuss for user requirements
analysis are the XML documents definitions and also useful tools for
this system.

Best regards,

--
Guillermo