QtCS2024 Qt Documentation

Session Summary

Qt Documentation State of the Union (Nicholas Bennet)

- How do I contribute?

- Where do I find the documentation I need?

- How do I give feedback?

Documentation Infrastructure (Paul Wicking)

- Infrastructure

- QDoc: Recent development

- QDoc: Future development

Feedback

• Current state:
  • 100k+ pages of active Qt documentation
  • 5 maintained versions, 3 lts, 55 oss modules, 3 commercial modules, 11 tools.
• How it's delivered
  • online (doc.qt.io), offline (QtC and QtDS)
  • You can also do a docbook generation.
• Team is formed by tech writers, and sw engineers.
• There is a gerrit group for documentation reviewers in case changes need it.
• the team welcome contributions: https://wiki.qt.io/Category:Developing_Qt::Documentation
• Qt Docs is adopting the usage of the Diátaxis doc organization approach: https://diataxis.fr/
• Changes in the sidebar from the docs.
• (Eddy laughed very hard when the quote "We will not need docs anymore, thanks to LLM" was mentioned by Nick, referring to some common misconceptions about LLMs :D)
• Suggestions:
  • Use your active voice.
  • Lots of people asked for more snippets within the codes.

(discussion started)

• Cristián requested for snippets to live in files rather than inline in qdoc,for translating them to Python (for the pyside docs)
• Eddy interjected that having files is even better, because we can compile and check the snippets.
• Tukkaa asked that maybe we could request snippets from the users/readers even if they are not the best quality.
• Kai: We have a feedback survey in place that is helping with the process
• Paul: We might end up with worthless snippets, or people using LLMs to generate them...and we might need to curated them.
• Daniel: we could use LLMs to read/evaluate the snippets provided by people.

(ended)

• Infra team is mostly Paul and Topi at the moment, plus a few technical writers.
• JIRA: QTBUG/Build tools: qdoc and QTWEBSITE/doc.qt.io
• Responsible from the doc builds on COIN, publishing infra, and provisioning binaries.
• The qdoc warnings have been documented in order to give to users a good experience while fixing issues.
• qdoc is provisioning via the Qt Installer.
• Recent development:
  • \fn template common overloads
  • ordering commands for comparison categories
  • \details
  • \nativetype
  • \tm trademark
  • preparing for c++20
  • Refactoring
  • lots of bug fixing.

(discussion started)

• Cristián: is there any list of missing commands or planned ones?
• Paul: We don't have that one, and the new commands are based on need.
• Tuukka: what's the use case of videos?
• Paul & Nick: we have a few qml ones that are very useful. Creating videos is a lot of work and some professional could do it.
• Emilia: we could provide videos urls in case that's needed.

(ended)

• Soon:
  • QML DOM API: things are evolving so we need to catchup.
  • Performance upgrades: lots of work on speeding up parts of qdoc.
  • C++ language features that are coming with new versions

• We got some external contributions for translations
• There is interest from KDE to use qdoc.
• Nicholas: KDE currently using doxygen, and there are some things that don't work well with KDE code, that qdoc might do, because of the Qt-nature. QML is not recognized by doxygen. Some KDE people requested to have documentation in the headers rather than the implementation.
• Paul: Luca was hired some time ago, and did lots of improvements, but he moved to another team. There is currently discussion on a patch that enabled header-docs, and Doc team is reviewing.
• Nicholas: There has been other details that KDE wants to change but it's not too complicated.

Session Owners

Nicholas Bennet, Qt Group Paul Wicking, Qt Group