Please review: JDK-8178725: provide way to link to external documentation (original) (raw)

Kumar Srinivasan kumar.x.srinivasan at oracle.com
Thu Apr 20 22:36:19 UTC 2017

Thanks for all the comments and feed back, I will go with what we have, for now, likely its not the last time we will be touching this before jdk9 is done.

Kumar

On 2017-04-20 20:02, Jonathan Gibbons wrote:

David, Magnus,

Yes, this is somewhat Oracle-specific (more accurately it is JDK-specific, which is why this is a proposed to be a JDK build-time taglet, and not a standard tag in the standard doclet), but it is no worse than the explicit Oracle-specific URLs that have been used up to now, or the relative links using {@docRoot}/../stuff which assume that "stuff " is available nearby somehow. I would also go further and say this is better that the existing methodology because it abstracts all the linking to a single taglet, removing it from inline in the doc comments. I agree, it's in no way worse than what already existed. But it shed light on the somewhat unclear division between online Oracle documentation and OpenJDK documentation. Just to be clear: I do not oppose the fix. It looks good to me. If anything, there was a bit of a clash between on the one hand providing a means for overriding the URL, but on the other hand not really making it as general as it could be. Either removing the possibility to override it (and, as you say, let an alternative implementation change the code of the taglet itself), or as Roger suggest, using a more general mechanism like MessageFormat would have the code make slightly more sense. The simplest way is probably to skip the property override, which doesn't get used anyhow right now (and therefore suspect according to "if you don't test it, it is (or will become) broken"). /Magnus Yes, the currently proposed taglet may assume the existence of single "base URL", but anyone with an alternate implementation of OpenJDK could change the impl of the taglet to use any other mechanism to establish the link. Doing a "strings in switch" on the identifier to select a URL comes to mind, and avoids anyone having to edit the main source doc comments. -- Jon

On 04/19/2017 01:37 PM, David Holmes wrote: On 20/04/2017 3:50 AM, Kumar Srinivasan wrote: We could potentially make the default URL to be "some" cgi url, and have the build system specify the URL all the time, in our case it would be the Oracle documentation URL. Would this be an acceptable approach ? I'm not sure what you mean. I have a hard time seeing how a simple identifier (that will be fixed in the file using the taglet) can be attached to an arbitrary URL to yield a valid result. As Magnus said, being able to change the URL is good, but it still requires the same "kind" of URL where the identifier is used as a key. Imagine you have all the documentation locally on your machine then try to figure out how you could link to other local documentation using this scheme. David Kumar

On 19/04/2017 9:26 PM, Magnus Ihse Bursie wrote: On 2017-04-18 19:44, Kumar Srinivasan wrote: Hello,

As explained in the JBS issue [1], this new taglet enables API documents to contain the extLink tag to link external sources. Please review the webrev [2]. Changes looks good. Just a reflection: This is heavily biased to Oracle documentation. Even if it's possible to override the URL via a system property, it assumes the Oracle URL format and id name. Just wondering a bit how that fits with the OpenJDK philosophy. I have to agree, this is not at all general purpose but totally Oracle documentation centric. David -----

/Magnus

Thanks Kumar [1] https://bugs.openjdk.java.net/browse/JDK-8178725 [2] http://cr.openjdk.java.net/~ksrini/8178725/webrev.00/

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