[erlang-questions] Running edoc:application( ) on Windows 7, but it's not finding any modules

[Richard Carlsson]

On 2013-10-11 04:34 , John R. Ashmun wrote:
> Hi.
> I have a new application, MIX, the directories of which are organized as
> recommended in Erlang And OTP In Action, e.g., given that my Erlang-y
> home directory is
> c:\Program Files\erl5.9\usr\john
> the application's top level is "MIX" in my home directory, and in it are
> doc
> ebin
> include
> priv
> src
> There are two modules in src (and the corresponding .beam files in ebin,
> along with MIX.app).  There is also an overview.edoc file in doc.
> I was hoping that, from a command prompt with MIX as its current
> directory, that running
> werl -pa ebin
> and using
> edoc:application( 'MIX', ".", [] ).
> in the shell would find these modules (which are named 'MIX' and 'M')
> and generate some documentation, but this doesn't succeed, although a
> nice, rather empty Overview is generated.

When you give the path as "-pa ebin", OTP won't realize that the path 
"ebin" has anything to do with the application 'MIX', so it won't look 
there. (Btw., it's probably a bad idea in the long run to use uppercase 
characters for an application name.)

In a proper release installation, you'd have added the path in some 
other way, giving a longer path ".../MIX/ebin" or using the ERL_LIBS 
environment variable to let OTP find that path for itself. But when 
testing from the command line like this, you can say "-pa ../MIX/ebin" 
so that the path contains the application name.

Also see section 4.4 in the book.

     /Richard