[IPOL discuss] [IPOL edit] Added support for static content in demos

[Nicolas Limare]

Rafael,

> I was wondering if this support for static files is only for demos,
> or if it could also be used for other purposes.

It is in the demo code and as such only for demos. More precisely, it
is only for small, static files needed by the demo templates (not for
input, not for data, etc).
-> https://tools.ipol.im/wiki/doc/demo/templates/static/
 
> For example, in the initial LSD IPOL page, the Doxigen documentation of
> the code was accessible with a link. [...] Maybe it is already
> possible to include this kind of contents as part of an IPOL
> article, accessible on its main page.

It is currently not possible to include cuch content in the web page
of an IPOL article. The reasons are:
* This kind of doc contains hundreds of small files (pages, images,
  image maps, etc) and this is not well adapted to the tools we use to
  manage the ipol website (a sork of wiki engine with git backend).
* Source code doc released online needs to be kept in-sync with the
  source code published in the article, and we have no mechanism to
  manage this sync.
* Publishing the source code doc in the main journal website adds as
  lot of new web content indexed in search engines with less relevance
  and more redundancy than the core IPOL content: the articles.

Nevertheless, I agree that a source code documentation is very useful
and youd be a good addition to IPOL. I think a correct way would be to
do it
* out of http://www.ipol.im, but close to it, because this doc is not a
  content reviewed and published; not a demo either; we could do it on
  http://tools.ipol.im/doc/ for example
* linked from the article pages, with the proper warnings (this is not
  reviewed, etc)
* automatic; I think we can not manually keep the doc in sync when
  preprints are regularly updated; even the code of published articles
  is sometimes updated

I can imagine a web service with one input parameter, the URL of the
source code archive, and this service would download the code,
decompress, build the doxygen doc and redirect visitors to this
doc. With a local cache so that download, decompress and build happens
only if it has not been done before.

But there are two obstacles:
* we need a uniform way to build the doxygen doc for every code
* we need someone to spend one week or more developping this service,
  then maintain it
The second point is the most delicate. No one in the IPOL group is
volunteering for web development work, so it's difficult to have any
new feature on the website.

> Otherwise, could it be possible to be included as static files as
> for demos?

No, because source code doc is not demo. And it would be even more
difficult to keep it updated. And it would insert lots of heavy static
data in the demo code, while we are planning to remove the hundreds of
Mb of static input data and keep only the code.

-- 
Nicolas LIMARE
http://nicolas.limare.net/                         pgp:0xFA423F4F
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