tl;dr: gtk-doc will now bind autoconf PACKAGE_* variables for use in your documentation.
For various modules which use gtk-doc, it’s a bit of a rite of passage to copy some build machinery from somewhere to generate a version.xml file which contains your package version, so that you can include it in your generated documentation (“Documenting version X of package Y”).
This is a bit of a pain. It doesn’t have to happen any longer.
gtk-doc master (to become 1.25) now generates a xml/gtkdocentities.ent file containing a few PACKAGE_* variables as generated by autoconf. So, you can now get rid of your version.xml machinery, and change your top-level documentation XML file’s DOCTYPE to the following:
<?xml version="1.0"?> <!DOCTYPE book PUBLIC "-//OASIS//DTD DocBook XML V4.3//EN" "http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/xml/4.3/docbookx.dtd" [ <!ENTITY % local.common.attrib "xmlns:xi CDATA #FIXED 'http://www.w3.org/2003/XInclude'"> <!ENTITY % gtkdocentities SYSTEM "xml/gtkdocentities.ent"> %gtkdocentities; ]>
You can now use &package_string;, &package_version;, &package_url;, etc. in your documentation. See gtk-doc.make for a full list.
Thanks to Stefan for getting this feature in!