Over the last few months I've been intermittently working on the documentation system for my brother's voxel rendering project, PolyVox. We decided that we would use Sphinx, the project built for and used by Python for their end-user documentation.

We were already using Doxygen for the API documentation but we wanted a tool which was appropriate for a manual, tutorials etc. so we went for Sphinx. This is filling a similar role to Docbook in KDE but I much preferred the reST syntax to the verbose XML of Docboook.

Of course in the tutorials, since it's describing the API we wanted to be able to easily link from Sphinx to the Doxygen documentation so I wrote a Sphinx extension called Doxylink to allow the documentation to link directly to the API HTML pages by using to the tag file output by Doxygen. Using a notation like :polyvox:`Volume` it will create a HTML link to to correct page for the class 'Volume'. You can link to classes, enums, functions etc. and it supports linking to the correct overloaded version of a function. The full documentation is available at packages.python.org.

After a number of 0.x releases I've just released version 1.0 with a completely rewritten parsing system to try to account for some of the confusing C++ idiosyncrasies without having to resort to a full-blown C++ parser.

It's great to see this article on BBC news (also on Ars Technica) reporting on the UK governments latest promises regarding considering open source software. Though, I'm sure this sort of thing has been said before, we're definitely seeing more and more reports of governments having a look at open source (see an earlier article on it, specifically mentioning Obama's government), however cagey their promises may be.

I'm sure that this isn't the end of the story since, as anyone who attended Patrick Harvie's talk at Akademy 2007 would know. He reported on some of the tactics that he'd seen Microsoft employ in order to prevent the idea of open source alternatives gaining mental footholds in the minds of people in power.

For me, the most important part of the BBC article is that it tells of how both of the interviewed expect the proprietary firms to react:

"I am absolutely certain there have been communications extremely high-up in proprietary vendors with management high up in government," said Mr Shine.
Mr Phipps added: "Measured over the short term traditional vendors will cut prices back, end load contacts and do everything to appear cheaper.
"But the real value with open source comes from giving users a new flexibility."

Finally, it's good to see more high quality, non-FUD reporting about FOSS where it's treated as a sensible thing and not as some hippy idea. I look forward to any further concrete news on this.