Thanks to some superb work by Nader Morshed, Oliver Zeldin, and Ian Rees, we now have automatically updated Sphinx docs for CCTBX:
Obviously these are still pretty sparse - right now most of the formal documentation is clustered here:
libtbx
libtbx.utils
libtbx.phil (mostly re-using Ralf's old documentation)
cctbx.miller
iotbx.pdb (built on Ralf's newsletter article)
mmtbx.command_line
These are a combination of inline docstrings and separate restructured text files in cctbx_project/sphinx. We have automatically generated rst files for some modules, but others will need to be added manually. In the end I think we'll want to curate every file, but the current layout will get us started. To facilitate additional contributions, I've modifed the installation script for base packages to include a --sphinx option. After setting up CCTBX you can then do this:
cd $BUILD
libtbx.configure sphinx
cd $SRC/cctbx_project/sphinx
make html
and you will get the full documentation built locally. I am still figuring out how to use Sphinx effectively; it is definitely possible to document Boost.Python extensions but it's not quite as obvious.
I don't expect us to retroactively document several hundred thousand lines of code written over a decade, but if we can get the core parts thoroughly covered that will greatly reduce the barrier for new developers. Suggestions for particular modules to focus on are appreciated; I am going to try to cover the basic PDB+reflection file functionality. I encourage anyone doing CCTBX-related development to contribute as you go. (They don't need to be your own APIs, just modules you're reasonably familiar with.) Those of you who already have a ton of undocumented code can expect me to harass you periodically about fixing this.
(Note that I've cannibalized at least one newsletter article for this, and continue to do so; we should re-use existing prose descriptions as much as possible without violating copyrights.)
-Nat