Prerequisite tools are Bash 2.0 or later, Doxygen, and the GNU coreutils. (GNU versions of find, xargs, and possibly sed and grep are used, just because the GNU versions make things very easy.)

To generate the pretty pictures and hierarchy graphs, the Graphviz package will need to be installed. For PDF output, pdflatex is required.

Be warned the PDF file generated via doxygen is extremely large. At last count, the PDF file is over three thousand pages. Generating this document taxes the underlying TeX formatting system, and will require the expansion of TeX's memory capacity. Specifically, the pool_size variable in the configuration file texmf.cnf may need to be increased by a minimum factor of two.

The following Makefile rules run Doxygen to generate HTML docs, XML docs, XML docs as a single file, PDF docs, and the man pages. These rules are not conditional! If the required tools are not found, or are the wrong versions, the rule may end in an error.

make doc-html-doxygen

make doc-xml-doxygen

make doc-xml-single-doxygen

make doc-pdf-doxygen

make doc-man-doxygen

Generated files are output into separate sub directories of doc/doxygen/ in the build directory, based on the output format. For instance, the HTML docs will be in doc/doxygen/html.

Careful observers will see that the Makefile rules simply call a script from the source tree, run_doxygen, which does the actual work of running Doxygen and then (most importantly) massaging the output files. If for some reason you prefer to not go through the Makefile, you can call this script directly. (Start by passing --help.)

If you wish to tweak the Doxygen settings, do so by editing doc/doxygen/user.cfg.in. Notes to fellow library hackers are written in triple-# comments.

Sometimes, mis-configuration of the pre-requisite tools can lead to errors when attempting to build the documentation. Here are some of the obvious errors, and ways to fix some common issues that may appear quite cryptic.

First, if using a rule like make pdf, try to narrow down the scope of the error to either docbook (make doc-pdf-docbook) or doxygen (make doc-pdf-doxygen).

Working on the doxygen path only, closely examine the contents of the following build directory: build/target/libstdc++-v3/doc/doxygen/latex. Pay attention to three files enclosed within, annotated as follows.

If the error at hand is not obvious after examination, a fall-back strategy is to start commenting out the doxygen input sources, which can be found in doc/doxygen/user.cfg.in, look for the INPUT tag. Start by commenting out whole directories of header files, until the offending header is identified. Then, read the latex log files to try and find surround text, and look for that in the offending header.

In general, libstdc++ files should be formatted according to the rules found in the Coding Standard. Before any doxygen-specific formatting tweaks are made, please try to make sure that the initial formatting is sound.

Adding Doxygen markup to a file (informally called “doxygenating”) is very simple. The Doxygen manual can be found here. We try to use a very-recent version of Doxygen.

For classes, use deque/vector/list and std::pair as examples. For functions, see their member functions, and the free functions in stl_algobase.h. Member functions of other container-like types should read similarly to these member functions.

Some commentary to accompany the first list in the Special Documentation Blocks section of the Doxygen manual:

Some specific guidelines:

Use the @-style of commands, not the !-style. Please be careful about whitespace in your markup comments. Most of the time it doesn't matter; doxygen absorbs most whitespace, and both HTML and *roff are agnostic about whitespace. However, in <pre> blocks and @code/@endcode sections, spacing can have “interesting” effects.

Use either kind of grouping, as appropriate. doxygroups.cc exists for this purpose. See stl_iterator.h for a good example of the “other” kind of grouping.

Please use markup tags like @p and @a when referring to things such as the names of function parameters. Use @e for emphasis when necessary. Use @c to refer to other standard names. (Examples of all these abound in the present code.)

Complicated math functions should use the multi-line format. An example from random.h:

One area of note is the markup required for @file markup in header files. Two details are important: for filenames that have the same name in multiple directories, include part of the installed path to disambiguate. For example:

The other relevant detail for header files is the use of a libstdc++-specific doxygen alias that helps distinguish between public header files (like random) from implementation or private header files (like bits/c++config.h.) This alias is spelled @headername and can take one or two arguments that detail the public header file or files that should be included to use the contents of the file. All header files that are not intended for direct inclusion must use headername in the file block. An example:

Be careful about using certain, special characters when writing Doxygen comments. Single and double quotes, and separators in filenames are two common trouble spots. When in doubt, consult the following table.

Editing the DocBook sources requires an XML editor. Many exist: some notable options include emacs, Kate, or Conglomerate.

Some editors support special “XML Validation” modes that can validate the file as it is produced. Recommended is the nXML Mode for emacs.

Besides an editor, additional DocBook files and XML tools are also required.

Access to the DocBook 5.0 stylesheets and schema is required. The stylesheets are usually packaged by vendor, in something like docbook5-style-xsl. To exactly match generated output, please use a version of the stylesheets equivalent to docbook5-style-xsl-1.75.2-3. The installation directory for this package corresponds to the XSL_STYLE_DIR in doc/Makefile.am and defaults to /usr/share/sgml/docbook/xsl-ns-stylesheets.

For processing XML, an XSLT processor and some style sheets are necessary. Defaults are xsltproc provided by libxslt.

For validating the XML document, you'll need something like xmllint and access to the relevant DocBook schema. These are provided by a vendor package like libxml2 and docbook5-schemas-5.0-4

For PDF output, something that transforms valid Docbook XML to PDF is required. Possible solutions include dblatex, xmlto, or prince. Of these, dblatex is the default. Other options are listed on the DocBook web pages. Please consult the <libstdc++@gcc.gnu.org> list when preparing printed manuals for current best practice and suggestions.

For Texinfo output, something that transforms valid Docbook XML to Texinfo is required. The default choice is docbook2X.

For epub output, the stylesheets for EPUB3 are required. These stylesheets are still in development. To validate the created file, epubcheck is necessary.

The following Makefile rules generate (in order): an HTML version of all the DocBook documentation, a PDF version of the same, and a single XML document. These rules are not conditional! If the required tools are not found, or are the wrong versions, the rule may end in an error.

make doc-html-docbook

make doc-pdf-docbook

make doc-xml-single-docbook

Generated files are output into separate sub directores of doc/docbook/ in the build directory, based on the output format. For instance, the HTML docs will be in doc/docbook/html.

If the Docbook stylesheets are installed in a custom location, one can use the variable XSL_STYLE_DIR to override the Makefile defaults. For example:

	
make XSL_STYLE_DIR="/usr/share/xml/docbook/stylesheet/nwalsh" doc-html-docbook
	
      

Sometimes, mis-configuration of the pre-requisite tools can lead to errors when attempting to build the documentation. Here are some of the obvious errors, and ways to fix some common issues that may appear quite cryptic.

First, if using a rule like make pdf, try to narrow down the scope of the error to either docbook (make doc-pdf-docbook) or doxygen (make doc-pdf-doxygen).

Working on the docbook path only, closely examine the contents of the following build directory: build/target/libstdc++-v3/doc/docbook/latex. Pay attention to three files enclosed within, annotated as follows.

If the error at hand is not obvious after examination, or if one encounters the inscruitable “Incomplete \ifmmode” error, a fall-back strategy is to start commenting out parts of the XML document (regardless of what this does to over-all document validity). Start by commenting out each of the largest parts of the spine.xml file, section by section, until the offending section is identified.

After editing the xml sources, please make sure that the XML documentation and markup is still valid. This can be done easily, with the following validation rule:

	make doc-xml-validate-docbook
      

This is equivalent to doing:

	
	  xmllint --noout --valid xml/index.xml
	
      

Please note that individual sections and chapters of the manual can be validated by substituting the file desired for xml/index.xml in the command above. Reducing scope in this manner can be helpful when validation on the entire manual fails.

All Docbook xml sources should always validate. No excuses!

Complete details on Docbook markup can be found in the DocBook Element Reference, online. An incomplete reference for HTML to Docbook conversion is detailed in the table below.

And examples of detailed markup for which there are no real HTML equivalents are listed in the table below.