Docstring snarfing directions

[Steve Tell <tell at telltronics dot org>]

Greg and guilers everywhere,

	What are the near-term plans for the tools that extract
documentation strings from C code that exports guile APIs?  (and how can I
help things move in the right general direction?)

	I'm working on a guile-extended application that is approaching a
rich enough set of guile functions that it could use to have the reference
parts of its documentation extracted from the C source.  Long ago I
borrowed some of the snarfing and docstring facilities from scwm, and it
was a simple matter to adapt to the SCM_DEFINE style used in guile 1.4.

Some concrete questions: 

Are guile-doc-snarf, guile-func-name-check, guile-snarf.awk and friends
intended to be a general facility available to application writers, or are
they private to guile's internals?

Are there plans to extract docstrings associated with hooks, variables,
and "concepts" like Greg and Maciej's scwmdoc system?  How about
documenting other objects?  smobs come to mind here.

Do any tools depend yet on the format of the .doc files generated by
guile-doc-snarf?  Could the format be trivialy extended to encompass the
other types of docstrings?

I'm imagining a flow like this:

- Guile-doc-snarf extracts all docstrings from foo.c into foo.doc

- Another tool collates the entries from the *.doc files producing files
app-procedures.txt, app-hooks.txt, app-variables.txt, app-concepts.txt,
etc.

- Suitable backend scripts complete the markup of those text files into
the format of choice, probably texinfo or docbook as chosen by the
particular application. (Sure guile itself may choose texinfo, but
please don't make me reinvent the whole docstring-extraction system if my
app chooses docbook.)

I guess what I'm asking is, has this all been planned or even prototyped
already such that I can borrow ideas or additional pieces.  Or, if I
charge ahead, is there general interest in somthing like the above?

Steve