Breathe integration for the Sphinx generator?

[mikepurvis]

Would be great to be able to embed/reference C++ classes in Sphinx documentation, similar to referencing Python. This is possible using Breathe (docs), but there are a few things necessary:

• The Sphinx generator in rosdoc_lite would need to learn how to run doxygen for its XML output prior to running the main Sphinx job.
• We'd need to find a way to distribute Breathe, probably by backporting the Utopic python-breathe package to Trusty and hosting it on packages.ros.org, so that rosdoc_lite could depend on this.

[jack-oquin]

I don't know much about how to do that, but would be happy to merge a patch that handles it.

[bit-pirate]

Ended up here after trying and failing to get Breathe collaborating with rosdoc_lite. So a +1 from my side.

[koniarik]

Hi folks, I am interested in making this work but this matter seems ignored for a while now and I am curious how you think it would be wise to continue now with it.

I personally would like to have this capabillity in Kinetic and I am more than willing to help.

[tfoote]

We're looking forward to upgrading the buildfarm to run on xenial that would remove one major hurdle for this to be deployed. If you can add the ability to integrate breathe in a backwards compatible way that would be an appreciated contribution.

[mikepurvis]

I lost interest in this as we (Clearpath) gave up on rosdoc_lite in favour of a new documentation generator based on catkin_tools. See: https://github.com/mikepurvis/catkin_tools_document

It handles the XML generation, and we simply include breathe as a python package in our main distribution bundle (though it could easily be release as a debian package, backported or otherwise).

[jack-oquin]

I am still open to the idea of fixing this, if someone would like to contribute a pull request.