Name: rm29839 Date: 11/03/97


We want to distribute documentation but not sources to
our customers, and have them merge our doc pages with their
global documentation.

Even if we do a "big bang" run of javadoc to pull in
java.lang and java.util into tree.html, packages.html,
and allNames.html, we can easily get into trouble if
we drop those files on top of their global files.

Do you have plans to produce a catman-style merge
tool, where we give it the three global files and
their contents get _added_ to the target files?
Or even better, we just give it our package pages
and they get indexed?

This seems a different tool from javadoc (doesn't
parse java as input). It might be a perl script or
small java program. Has someone already produced
this? How would I find out?

Reason I'm asking for this is twofold:

  1. I want to know if you're heading in this
     direction, so that I can "meet" you in the
     future. If not, I want to know how you
     plan to address the installation-time
     merge problem so that I can head in a
     similar direction.

  2. I am willing to throw together a script to
     do the merge, and make it available, but
     I don't want to make the effort and then
     find out someone has already done the work.

I haven't looked at how to do this, but I imagine
it would be easy to add package names to
packages.html. It's harder to add to tree.html
but not very hard (love those associative
arrays).

The hard part would be to make a tool that fits
in with your split allNames.html. I might simply
add a link to a separate myNames.html from the
first page of the split allNames. For our
purposes this would be better, because our names
would be together "on-topic"...

By the way, if the javadoc tool produced a big
HTML comment at the end of each class/interface
page, describing the class and methods in an
easy-to-parse layout, it would be really easy
to put together merge tools. This could be
done with the templates in the 1.2beta. When
can I get a copy of the 1.2beta javadoc by the
way?
(Review ID: 18590)
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