How to create the developer documentation of Unity8 for customizing?

marc_aurel · 16 Dec 2018, 15:38

As a developer I would like to get a documentation of Unity8 like Javadoc, Appledoc or QDoc for customization of the home screen and scopes.

The source at Github suggests to build the documentation:

You can also install docs from the bionic or xenial repo that inclues a auto-generated docs including class infomation. This package is called unity8-doc and will be installed to /usr/share/doc/unity8 here there will be an index.html, open this in your browser.

What is bionic and xenial. Just a name of a Git repository?
How can I generate the docs? Which terminal command do I have to use?
What is a Deb-package? Is that a similar artifact like an RPM-package?

I tried to build the project without packaging but the setting of crosscompule respectively LXD on my Ubuntu developer machine:

crossbuilder setup-lxd
LXD was installed but is not accessible. Please restart your computer.

Some suggestion to fix the problem. My Ubuntu 18.10 system is a quite fresh installation. Restarting the computer doesn't help.

dobey · 16 Dec 2018, 21:18

What is bionic and xenial. Just a name of a Git repository?

These are the code names of Ubuntu 18.04 and 16.04 respectively, and refers to the apt package repositories for both.

How can I generate the docs? Which terminal command do I have to use?

From the unity8 source tree, after having run cmake to configure the build, I believe it is make doc or similar, but also the docs are built when building the whole tree.

What is a Deb-package? Is that a similar artifact like an RPM-package?

.deb is the file extension of Debian format packages, which are used by Debian based distributions like Ubuntu.

However, this documentation won't really tell you how to "customize" the "home screen" (apps scope) or other arbitrary scopes. It is developer documentation, and may include some information about how to develop scopes. However, in bionic (18.04) branch of unity8, the dash and scopes have been removed.

marc_aurel · 17 Dec 2018, 07:25

@dobey Thanks. Very clear answer. Do you have a recommendation to resolve the crossbuild issue? Or is it sufficuent to use cmake and make commands?

kwah · 17 Dec 2018, 21:34

@marc_aurel said in How to create the developer documentation of Unity8 for customizing?:

@dobey Thanks. Very clear answer. Do you have a recommendation to resolve the crossbuild issue? Or is it sufficuent to use cmake and make commands?

/me having similar issue with crossbuilder setup-lxd. Is 18.10 supported by crossbuilder?

dobey · 17 Dec 2018, 22:33

@marc_aurel I'm not very familiar with it, and haven't used it myself, so unfortunately not. It seems like maybe there is an issue with the version of lxd in use on your system. Probably should ask about that separately.

But as I said, there isn't really much useful in terms of documentation in the unity8 tree. So for what you are looking for, is likely a waste of time to build it. Also, as scopes are going away, I suppose it doesn't make sense to publish the documentation. IIRC, most of the documentation is about widgets provided by Unity which scopes can "use" in their search results and previews.