Re: [Qemu-trivial] [Qemu-devel] [PATCH v2] CODING_STYLE: Define our preferred form for multiline comments

[Markus Armbruster <armbru@redhat.com>]

Peter Maydell <peter.maydell@linaro.org> writes:

> On 13 June 2018 at 17:55, John Snow <jsnow@redhat.com> wrote:
[...]
>> It would only begin to matter terribly much if we actually decided we
>> wanted to do a doxygen-style doc generation for our internal APIs for
>> compatibility with, say, fancier IDEs than vim/emacs.
>
> We ought to do that at some point -- I had some prototype patches
> for it. Doc-comment comments always start /** on a line of its own,
> though.
>
>> As it stands, we're pretty inconsistent about which exact style we apply
>> when we "document" internal functions -- sometimes we document the
>> header, sometimes the implementation, sometimes both (but differently!)
>> and always with different styles all over the place. That's the real
>> problem, IMO.
>
> IMHO -- global functions should always be documented in the header
> with the prototype, and any new global function should get a
> doc comment (I require this for code I review...) I should be able
> to read about the API your code exposes to the rest of QEMU purely
> by looking at your headers.

Putting the function contract far from the actual function is a proven
way to end up with a contract that is far from what the function
actually does.

With a documentation generator such as Sphinx, the usual argument for
putting the contracts in headers "I want API documentation in one place,
without clutter" carries a lot less weight: the generated documentation
is exactly that.