Date: Fri, 24 May 1996 02:28:34 -0500 (EST) From: John Fieber <jfieber@indiana.edu> To: Francisco Reyes <reyes01@ibm.net> Cc: FreeBSD doc Mailing list <doc@FreeBSD.org> Subject: Re: Hardware compatibility documentation Message-ID: <Pine.NEB.3.93.960524020223.448L-100000@Fieber-John.campusview.indiana.edu> In-Reply-To: <199605240445.EAA203934@pop01.ny.us.ibm.net>
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On Fri, 24 May 1996, Francisco Reyes wrote:
> SGML is not database friendly.
!! I'll make you eat that statement. :-)
You have it exactly backward. SGML is *far* better suited for
representing and manipulating structured data than any
traditional database I've ever met. Of course, for an
application this small, it probably doesn't matter much.
> Once we have an ASCII file with one entry
> per item then writing a program to convert that to SGML is
> a one shot deal. The other advantage of this approach is that
> we can easily change the format if the need arised.
Again, backwards. Once we have an SGML file then writing a
program to convert that to ASCII is a one shot deal. Of course,
if you are doing the coding, I'll just shut my mouth and be
happy. :-)
> I also think that it is better to start collecting the data and then
> consider how we want to present it.
On the other hand, we need to think about what information we
want to present so we know what information to try and collect.
I'm not one for blind data collection. Specifically, just
collecting a list of hardware isn't very useful. We need to ask
precise questions about how that hardware does or doesn't work.
A vague question ("Comments?") isn't going to generate very
useful responses. Other interesting questions that might be
useful to users is knowing what application a given collection of
hardware is being used for. If I'm looking for a machine to use
as a heavy duty web server, It would be nice if I could look and
see what sort of hardware setups people are using in that
setting. There are a bazillion questions we can ask, but nobody
will answer a bazillion so we have to trim it down to a few
carefully selected ones.
(oh, and just to jab a bit more, your one line database probably
won't handle the essay questions so well :-)
> Where do we go from here?
> Let's get this started!
Agreed! A simple place is to design some www forms for
collecting the basic hardware information and a cgi script to
pack it into a file or mail message. In the meantime we can
ponder what other information we would like to get, then add that
to the forms.
-john
== jfieber@indiana.edu ===========================================
== http://fallout.campusview.indiana.edu/~jfieber ================
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