Bug#930988: libtifiles FTCBFS: Missing dependency tfdocgen

[Lionel Debroux]

Hi Helmut,

On 25/06/2019 19:39, Helmut Grohne wrote:
> On Tue, Jun 25, 2019 at 09:43:24AM +0200, Lionel Debroux wrote:
> > tfdocgen is a simple HTML documentation generator, which supports a
> > Doxygen-like (but not Doxygen-compatible) syntax for C/C++ code, and
> > maybe other languages which supports /** */ comments, I haven't
> > tried. It was written by the previous maintainer over a decade ago,
> > I have barely modified it. The files it produces are packaged in the
> > -dev packages.
>
> Thank you for chiming in. So do you confirm that tfdocgen consumes
> only textual formats (source code with comment markup) and produces
> only textual formats (html) and that the behaviour and output is
> independent of the processor architecture being executed on?
Yes, yes and yes.
In Git HEAD, tfdocgen.c is a 600+ RLOC file, which can build with GCC
-std=gnu89 CFLAG (it uses C++-style // comments), and only depends on
the standard library + Glib. From a fairly cursory glance, I don't see
obvious portability issues in the code: no occurrence of "long" as a
data type, no usage of &, |, ^, << and >> operators indicating
(de)serialization and bit arithmetic.

In the 11-year-old 1.0 version packaged by Debian, this holds as well,
but several minor fixes of mine, the latest one from 2015, are missing.
I, uh, haven't produced a release of tfdocgen myself, so I'm the one to
blame for the fact distros are using an older version :)
I suppose I should produce one as part of the next release cycle,
hopefully by the end of the year. I should soon be down to two
significant items left on the todo list, but adding support for a 4th
calc <-> computer communication protocol is nontrivial work.


Bye,
Lionel.