In my ongoing effort to truly understand our new kernel-doc, I continue to
make changes to improve the code, and to try to make the understanding task
easier for the next person.  These patches focus on dump_struct() in
particular, which starts out at nearly 300 lines long - to much to fit into
my little brain anyway.  Hopefully the result is easier to manage.

There are no changes in the rendered docs.

(At some point I think this code could benefit from a deeper rework.  We
are essentially making three parsing passes over these declarations -
dump_struct(), create_parameter_list(), and push_parameter() for structs -
and it seems like we ought to be able to do better.  But that's for another
day.)

(This is post-merge-window material, obviously).

Jonathan Corbet (12):
  docs: kdoc: consolidate the stripping of private struct/union members
  docs: kdoc: Move a regex line in dump_struct()
  docs: kdoc: backslashectomy in kdoc_parser
  docs: kdoc: move the prefix transforms out of dump_struct()
  docs: kdoc: split top-level prototype parsing out of dump_struct()
  docs: kdoc: split struct-member rewriting out of dump_struct()
  docs: kdoc: rework the rewrite_struct_members() main loop
  docs: kdoc: remove an extraneous strip() call
  docs: kdoc: Some rewrite_struct_members() commenting
  docs: kdoc: further rewrite_struct_members() cleanup
  docs: kdoc: extract output formatting from dump_struct()
  docs: kdoc: a few final dump_struct() touches

 scripts/lib/kdoc/kdoc_parser.py | 516 +++++++++++++++++---------------
 1 file changed, 267 insertions(+), 249 deletions(-)

-- 
2.50.1

Em Thu, 31 Jul 2025 18:13:14 -0600
Jonathan Corbet <corbet@lwn.net> escreveu:

> In my ongoing effort to truly understand our new kernel-doc, I continue to
> make changes to improve the code, and to try to make the understanding task
> easier for the next person.  These patches focus on dump_struct() in
> particular, which starts out at nearly 300 lines long - to much to fit into
> my little brain anyway.  Hopefully the result is easier to manage.
> 
> There are no changes in the rendered docs.
> 
> (At some point I think this code could benefit from a deeper rework.  We
> are essentially making three parsing passes over these declarations -
> dump_struct(), create_parameter_list(), and push_parameter() for structs -
> and it seems like we ought to be able to do better.  But that's for another
> day.)

True. I tried not to do too much optimizations during conversion, as it
would make harder to compare with kernel_doc.pl, but yeah, the entire
logic around parsing structs and functions has always been a nightmare.

My understanding is that the original Perl code was written this way to
make easier to handle typedefs and structs the same way. So, common
code was placed at create_parameter_list(). The push_parameter() is
there to have some common code used on several parts of
create_parameter_list() on a single place.

If I were designing it from scratch with no strings attached to Perl, 
I would probably create a separate class just to manage struct
parameters - or alternatively, to deal with structs as a hole.

Thanks,
Mauro