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Documentation

This document describes how we generate documentation for xolotl, and why we made the decisions we did.

Philosophy

Self-documenting code

Ideally, one should be able to read the code and understand what it does. However, it's often not easy to understand why it does what it does, or what the bigger picture is.

In any case, we believe that documentation should be tightly coupled to the code it refers to, where possible. For example, it makes sense to include the documentation on how to use a certain method in the code for the method itself. This is what we have done for every single method of xolotl. If you open a file describing a xolotl method, you will find the documentation for it in that file.

Documentation should be built, not written

If we have documentation for each method mixed up with the code, then how do we put them all together in one place in the documentation? Obviously the answer is to programatically build the documentation from source (code), so that

  • we don't deal with copies of the same documentation in different places that we need to keep in sync
  • changes in the source code automatically lead to changes in the documentation

By "built", we mean that we use tools to automatically generated markdown files or HTML files from source code.

Simpler is better

Markdown has emerged as the near-universal standard in simple, yet powerful markup on the web. The nice thing about markdown is that it's perfectly readable as plain text too. This means that if something goes catastrophically wrong with your documentation build system, all is not lost, as people can still read the markdown source.

Therefore we write our documentation in markdown, either in standalone files, or inline with code, and generate nice HTML files using mkdocs.

A note to the pythonistas

We tried RestructuredText, and sphinx, and it was awful. Don't believe anyone who says it's good.

Toolchain

MKDocs

We like using mkdocs because:

  • it supports markdown
  • it's very easy to setup, and use
  • it can also serve docs locally, for testing

Material theme for MKdocs

This is a very nice-looking theme that I like. You're looking at it now. Link to project page

Hosting

Currently, our documentation is hosted on readthedocs.io. This may change, but this URL:

https://go.brandeis.edu/xolotl

will always point to the documentation