From 262086cf5b5343c2b81c97b1c606058e921859df Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: "Robert P. J. Day" Date: Sat, 10 Feb 2007 01:45:58 -0800 Subject: [PATCH] [PATCH] Discuss a couple common errors in kernel-doc usage. Explain a couple of the most common errors in kernel-doc usage. Signed-off-by: Robert P. J. Day Acked-by: Randy Dunlap Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds --- Documentation/kernel-doc-nano-HOWTO.txt | 37 ++++++++++++++++++++++--- 1 file changed, 33 insertions(+), 4 deletions(-) diff --git a/Documentation/kernel-doc-nano-HOWTO.txt b/Documentation/kernel-doc-nano-HOWTO.txt index 6ca507f4074..2075c0658bf 100644 --- a/Documentation/kernel-doc-nano-HOWTO.txt +++ b/Documentation/kernel-doc-nano-HOWTO.txt @@ -107,10 +107,14 @@ The format of the block comment is like this: * (section header: (section description)? )* (*)?*/ -The short function description cannot be multiline, but the other -descriptions can be (and they can contain blank lines). Avoid putting a -spurious blank line after the function name, or else the description will -be repeated! +The short function description ***cannot be multiline***, but the other +descriptions can be (and they can contain blank lines). If you continue +that initial short description onto a second line, that second line will +appear further down at the beginning of the description section, which is +almost certainly not what you had in mind. + +Avoid putting a spurious blank line after the function name, or else the +description will be repeated! All descriptive text is further processed, scanning for the following special patterns, which are highlighted appropriately. @@ -121,6 +125,31 @@ patterns, which are highlighted appropriately. '@parameter' - name of a parameter '%CONST' - name of a constant. +NOTE 1: The multi-line descriptive text you provide does *not* recognize +line breaks, so if you try to format some text nicely, as in: + + Return codes + 0 - cool + 1 - invalid arg + 2 - out of memory + +this will all run together and produce: + + Return codes 0 - cool 1 - invalid arg 2 - out of memory + +NOTE 2: If the descriptive text you provide has lines that begin with +some phrase followed by a colon, each of those phrases will be taken as +a new section heading, which means you should similarly try to avoid text +like: + + Return codes: + 0: cool + 1: invalid arg + 2: out of memory + +every line of which would start a new section. Again, probably not +what you were after. + Take a look around the source tree for examples.