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docs/README-documentation-rules.md: Initial shot at documenting this.

Ryan C. Gordon 11 months ago
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+# Rules for documentation
+
+These are the rules for the care and feeding of wikiheaders.pl.
+
+
+## No style guide
+
+When adding or editing documentation, we don't (currently) have a style guide
+for what it should read like, so try to make it consistent with the rest of
+the existing text. It generally should read more like technical reference
+manuals and not sound conversational in tone.
+
+Most of these rules are about how to make sure the documentation works on
+a _technical_ level, as scripts need to parse it, and there are a few simple
+rules we need to obey to cooperate with those scripts.
+
+## The wiki and headers share the same text.
+
+There is a massive Perl script (`build-scripts/wikiheaders.pl`, hereafter
+refered to as "wikiheaders") that can read both the wiki and the public
+headers, and move changes in one across to the other.
+
+If you prefer to use the wiki, go ahead and edit there. If you prefer to use
+your own text editor, or command line tools to batch-process text, etc, you
+can [clone the wiki as a git repo](https://github.com/libsdl-org/sdlwiki) and
+work locally.
+
+
+## Don't taunt wikiheaders.
+
+The script isn't magic; it's a massive pile of Regular Expressions and not
+a full C or markdown parser. While it isn't _fragile_, if you try to do clever
+things, you might confuse it. This is to the benefit of documentation, though,
+where we would rather you not do surprising things.
+
+
+## Most things in the headers can be documented.
+
+wikiheaders understands functions, typedefs, structs/unions/enums, `#defines`
+... basically most of what makes up a C header.
+
+
+## Defines right below typedefs and functions bind.
+
+Any `#define` directly below a function or non-struct/union/enum typedef is
+considered part of that declaration. This happens to work well with how our
+headers work, as these defines tend to be bitflags and such that are related
+to that symbol.
+
+wikiheaders will include those defines in the syntax section of the wiki
+page, and generate stub pages for each define that simply says "please refer
+to (The Actual Symbol You Care About)" with a link. It will also pull in
+any blank lines or most preprocessor directives for the syntax text, too.
+
+Sometimes an unrelated define, by itself, just happens to be right below one
+of these symbols in the header. The easiest way to deal with this is either
+to document that define with a Doxygen-style comment, if it makes sense to do
+so, or just add a normal C comment right above it if not, so wikiheaders
+doesn't bind it to the previous symbol.
+
+
+## Don't document the `SDL_test*.h` headers.
+
+These are in the public headers but they aren't really considered public APIs.
+They live in a separate library that doesn't, or at least probably shouldn't,
+ship to end users. As such, we don't want it documented on the wiki.
+
+For now, we do this by not having any Doxygen-style comments in these files.
+Please keep it that way! If you want to document these headers, just don't
+use the magic two-`*` comment.
+
+
+## Use Markdown.
+
+The wiki also supports MediaWiki format, but we are transitioning away from it.
+The headers always use Markdown. If you're editing the wiki from a git clone,
+just make .md files and the wiki will know what to do with them.
+
+
+## We _sort of_ write in Doxygen format.
+
+To document a symbol, we use something that looks like Doxygen (and Javadoc)
+standard comment format:
+
+```c
+/**
+ * This is a function that does something.
+ *
+ * It can be used for frozzling bobbles. Be aware that the Frozulator module
+ * _must_ be initialized before calling this.
+ *
+ * \param frozzlevel The amount of frozzling to perform.
+ * \param color What color bobble to frozzle. 0 is red, 1 is green.
+ * \returns the number of bobbles that were actually frozzled, -1 on error.
+ *
+ * \since This function is available since SDL 7.3.1.
+ *
+ * \threadsafety Do not call this from two threads at once, or the bobbles
+ *               won't all frozzle correctly!
+ *
+ * \sa SDL_DoSomethingElse
+ */
+extern DECLSPEC int SDLCALL SDL_DoSomething(int frozzlevel, int color);
+```
+
+Note the `/**` at the start of the comment. That's a "Doxygen-style" comment,
+and wikiheaders will treat this differently than a comment with one `*`, as
+this signifies that this is not just a comment, but _documentation_.
+
+We do _not_ parse every magic Doxygen tag, and we don't parse them in `@param`
+format. The goal here was to mostly coexist with people that might want
+to run Doxygen on the SDL headers, not to build Doxygen from scratch. That
+being said, compatibility with Doxygen is not a hard requirement here.
+
+wikiheaders uses these specific tags to turn this comment into a (hopefully)
+well-formatted wiki page, and also can generate manpages and books in LaTeX
+format from it!
+
+Text markup in the headers is _always_ done in Markdown format! But less is
+more: try not to markup text more than necessary.
+
+
+
+## Split paragraphs with a blank line.
+
+And don't indent them at all (indenting in Markdown is treated as preformatted
+text).
+
+wikiheaders will wordwrap header comments so they fit in 80 columns, so if you
+don't leave a blank line between paragraphs, they will smush into a single
+block of text when wordwrapping.
+
+
+## Don't worry about word wrapping.
+
+If you don't word-wrap your header edits perfectly (and you won't, I promise),
+wikiheaders will send your change to the wiki, and then to make things match,
+send it right back to the headers with correct word wrapping. Since this
+happens right after you push your changes, you might as well just write
+however you like and assume the system will clean it up for you.
+
+
+## The first line is the summary.
+
+The first line of a piece of documentation is meant to be a succinct
+description. This is what Doxygen would call the `\brief` tag. wikiheaders
+will split this text out until the first period (end of sentence!), and when
+word wrapping, shuffle the overflow into a new paragraph below it.
+
+
+## Things that start with `SDL_` will automatically become wiki links.
+
+wikiheaders knows to turn these into links to other pages, so if you reference
+an SDL symbol in the header documentation, you don't need to link to it.
+You can optionally wrap the symbol in backticks, and wikiheaders will know to
+link the backticked thing. It will not generate links in three-backtick
+code/preformatted blocks.
+
+
+## URLs will automatically become links.
+
+You can use Markdown's `[link markup format](https://example.com/)`, but
+sometimes it's clearer to list bare URLs; the URL will be visible on the
+wiki page, but also clickable to follow the link. This is up to your judgement
+on a case-by-case basis.
+
+
+## Doxygen tags we support:
+
+- `\brief one-line description` (Not required, and wikiheaders will remove them).
+- `\param varname description` (One for each function/macro parameter)
+- `\returns description` (One for each function, don't use on `void` returns).
+- `\sa` (each of these get tucked into a "See Also" section on the wiki)
+- `\since This function is available since SDL 3.0.0.` (one per Doxygen comment)
+- `\threadsafety description` (one per function/macro).
+
+Other Doxygen things might exist in the headers, but they aren't understood
+by wikiheaders.
+
+
+## Hide stuff from wikiheaders.
+
+If all else fails, you can block off pieces of the header with this
+magic line (whitespace is ignored):
+
+```c
+#ifndef SDL_WIKI_DOCUMENTATION_SECTION
+```
+
+Everything between this line and the next `#endif` will just be skipped by
+wikiheaders. Note that wikiheaders is not a C preprocessor! Don't try to
+nest conditionals or use `!defined`.
+
+Just block off sections if you need to. And: you almost never need to.
+
+
+## Hide stuff from the compiler.
+
+If you need to put something that's only of interest to wikiheaders, the
+convention is to put it in a block like this:
+
+```c
+#ifdef SDL_WIKI_DOCUMENTATION_SECTION
+```
+
+Generally this is used when there's a collection of preprocessor conditionals
+to define the same symbol differently in different circumstances. You put
+that symbol in this block with some reasonable generic version _and the
+Doxygen-style comment_. Because wikiheaders doesn't care about this
+preprocessor magic, and the C compiler can be as fancy as it wants, this is
+strictly a useful convention.
+
+
+## Struct/union/enum typedefs must have the name on the first line.
+
+This is because wikiheaders is not a full C parser. Don't write this:
+
+```c
+typedef struct
+{
+    int a;
+    int b;
+} SDL_MyStruct;
+```
+
+...make sure the name is at the start, too:
+
+```c
+typedef struct SDL_MyStruct
+{
+    int a;
+    int b;
+} SDL_MyStruct;
+```
+
+wikiheaders will complain loudly if you don't do this, and exit with an
+error message.
+
+
+## Code examples go in the wiki.
+
+We don't want the headers cluttered up with code examples. These live on the
+wiki pages, and wikiheaders knows to not bridge them back to the headers.
+
+Put them in a `## Code Examples` section, and make sure to wrap them in a
+three-backtick-c section for formatting purposes. Only write code in C,
+please.
+
+
+## Do you _need_ a code example?
+
+Most code examples aren't actually useful. If your code example is just
+`SDL_CreateWindow("Hello SDL", 640, 480, 0);` then just delete it; if all
+you're showing is how to call a function in C, it's not a useful code example.
+Not all functions need an example. One with complex setup or usage details
+might, though!
+
+
+## Code examples are compiled by GitHub Actions.
+
+On each change to the wiki, there is a script that pulls out all the code
+examples into discrete C files and attempts to compile them, and complains
+if they don't work.
+
+
+## It's okay to repeat yourself.
+
+Each individual piece of documentation becomes a separate page on the wiki, so
+small repeated details can just exist in different pieces of documentation. If
+it's complicated, it's not unreasonable to say "Please refer to
+SDL_SomeOtherFunction for more details" ... wiki users can click right
+through, header users can search for the function name.
+
+
+## The docs directory is bridged to the wiki, too.
+
+You might be reading this document on the wiki! Any `README-*.md` files in
+the docs directory are bridged to the wiki, so `docs/README-linux.md` lands
+at https://wiki.libsdl.org/SDL3/README/linux ...these are just copied directly
+without any further processing by wikiheaders, and changes go in both
+directions.
+
+
+## Wiki categories are (mostly) managed automatically.
+
+The wiki will see this pattern as the last thing on a page and treat it as a
+list of categories that page belongs to:
+
+```
+----
+[CategoryStuff](CategoryStuff), [CategoryWhatever](CategoryWhatever)
+```
+
+You can use this to simply tag a page as part of a category, and the user can
+click directly to see other pages in that category. The wiki will
+automatically manage a `Category*` pages that list any tagged pages.
+
+You _should not_ add tags to the public headers. They don't mean anything
+there. wikiheaders will add a few tags that make sense when generating wiki
+content from the header files, and it will preserve other tags already present
+on the page, so if you want to add extra categories to something, tag it on
+the wiki itself.
+
+The wiki uses some magic HTML comment tags to decide how to list items on
+Category pages and let other content live on the page as well. You can
+see an example of this in action at:
+
+https://raw.githubusercontent.com/libsdl-org/sdlwiki/main/SDL3/CategoryEvents.md
+
+
+## Categorizing the headers.
+
+To put a symbol in a specific category, we use three approaches in SDL:
+
+- Things in the `SDL_test*.h` headers aren't categorized at all (and you
+  shouldn't document them!)
+- Most files are categorized by header name: we strip off the leading `SDL_`
+  and capitalize the first letter of what's left. So everything in SDL_audio.h
+  is in the "Audio" category, everything in SDL_video.h is in the "Video"
+  category, etc.
+- If wikiheaders sees a comment like this on a line by itself...
+  ```c
+  /* WIKI CATEGORY: Blah */
+  ```
+  ...then all symbols below that will land in the "Blah" category. We use this
+  at the top of a few headers where the simple
+  chop-off-SDL_-and-captialize-the-first-letter trick doesn't work well, but
+  one could theoretically use this for headers that have some overlap in
+  category.
+
+
+## Category documentation lives in headers.
+
+To document a category (text that lives before the item lists on a wiki
+category page), you have to follow a simple rule:
+
+The _first_ Doxygen-style comment in a header must start with:
+
+```
+/**
+ * # CategoryABC
+```
+
+If these conditions aren't met, wikiheaders will assume that documentation
+belongs to whatever is below it instead of the Category.
+
+The text of this comment will be added to the appropriate wiki Category page,
+at the top, replacing everything in the file until it sees a line that starts
+with an HTML comment (`<!--`), or a line that starts with `----`. Everything
+after that in the wiki file will be preserved.
+
+Likewise, when bridging _back_ to the headers, if wikiheaders sees one of
+these comments, it'll copy the top section of the Category page back into the
+comment.
+
+Beyond stripping the initial ` * ` portion off each line, these comments are
+treated as pure Markdown. They don't support any Doxygen tags like `\sa` or
+`\since`.
+