1 files changed, 103 insertions, 0 deletions
diff --git a/README-building.txt b/README-building.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..9a1a1ac
--- /dev/null
+++ b/README-building.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,103 @@
+This file explains how to build the HTML documentation. As such, it's
+probably only useful to LeafLabs developers. Users can read the HTML
+for the latest release here:
+
+    http://leaflabs.com/docs/
+
+Install Dependencies
+--------------------
+
+First, you will need to install some dependencies (Doxygen, Sphinx,
+and Breathe).
+
+1. Much of the documentation is pulled out of the libmaple source
+   code's Doxygen comments, so you need a recent-ish version of
+   Doxygen in your PATH:
+
+    http://www.stack.nl/~dimitri/doxygen/download.html#latestsrc
+
+2. Documentation not taken from the libmaple sources is written in
+   Sphinx's extensions to the reStructuredText (reST) markup language.
+   (More about Sphinx: http://sphinx.pocoo.org/tutorial.html).
+
+   These are your choices for how to install Sphinx:
+
+   - From source or .egg:
+     http://pypi.python.org/pypi/Sphinx#downloads
+
+   - Via easy_install:
+     $ sudo easy_install -U Sphinx
+
+   You need Sphinx version >= 1.0.6.
+
+3. We use a Sphinx plugin called Breathe to parse Doxygen's XML output
+   into a form usable by Sphinx. (More about Breathe:
+   http://michaeljones.github.com/breathe/).
+
+   LeafLabs sometimes patches Breathe for the purposes of building our
+   docs, so clone the LeafLabs Breathe tree from GitHub (somewhere
+   else on your system, NOT in the leaflabs-docs repo):
+
+   - LeafLabs developers, clone with push permissions:
+     $ git clone git@github.com:leaflabs/breathe.git
+
+   - Everyone else, clone without them:
+     $ git clone git://github.com/leaflabs/breathe.git
+
+   After that's done, set an environment variable BREATHE_HOME to
+   point to your clone.  Something like this in Bash:
+
+    $ export BREATHE_HOME=/path/to/breathe/repo/
+
+   (You'll want to put this in your shell startup script.)
+
+Build the Docs
+--------------
+
+You are finally ready to build the documentation.  First, you'll
+produce Doxygen XML output, then you can generate the final HTML docs.
+
+1. Before the first time you run Sphinx (and any time the Doxygen
+   comments in the libmaple source code are changed), you'll need to
+   re-run doxygen on libmaple.
+
+    $ cd /path/to/libmaple
+    $ make doxygen
+
+   Doxygen will yell at you a lot; it's generally safe to ignore it.
+
+2. Finally, you can build the HTML (in the leaflabs-docs repository):
+
+    $ cd /path/to/leaflabs-docs
+    $ make html
+
+   On Windows, you can supposedly use the batch file make.bat instead.
+
+   Breathe will yell at you a lot; it's often safe to ignore this,
+   too. C'est la vie.
+
+Read and Modify the Docs
+------------------------
+
+Point your web browser at the file
+
+  build/html/index.html
+
+For the most part, the file build/html/foo.html is built from
+source/foo.rst.  (The index is an exception, because we needed to
+hand-hack the HTML to get the "Contents at a Glance" section to look
+nice).
+
+All of the documentation which isn't pulled out of libmaple's Doxygen
+comments lives in source/.  The directory source/_static/ is for
+static content (like style sheets); source/_templates/ is meant to
+contain Sphinx templates.
+
+Read more about Sphinx and use the existing leaflabs-docs source for
+examples when writing new docs.  The directory tmpl/ contains template
+ReST files you should sometimes use when creating a page that follows
+a pattern (like a libmaple API page), in order to keep the style
+consistent.
+
+The file source/conf.py is the Sphinx configuration file; you can go
+read it for more information about our setup.