From owner-freebsd-doc  Mon Jan  8  2:25:24 2001
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Date: Mon, 8 Jan 2001 09:58:15 +0000
From: Nik Clayton <nik@freebsd.org>
To: "Bruce A. Mah" <bmah@FreeBSD.ORG>
Cc: Alexander Langer <alex@big.endian.de>, freebsd-doc@FreeBSD.ORG,
	wilko@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject: Re: RELNOTESng update
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References: <200101051950.f05Jo0H24919@bmah-freebsd-0.cisco.com> <20010105213719.A49975@cichlids.cichlids.com> <200101061700.f06H0Bn34252@bmah-freebsd-0.cisco.com>
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In-Reply-To: <200101061700.f06H0Bn34252@bmah-freebsd-0.cisco.com>; from bmah@FreeBSD.ORG on Sat, Jan 06, 2001 at 09:00:11AM -0800
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On Sat, Jan 06, 2001 at 09:00:11AM -0800, Bruce A. Mah wrote:
> > If you're changing it anyways:
> > Didn't Nik say lately, that he'd like stuff be converted to XML?
> 
> Hmmm.  I remember that this topic came up at the doc BOF at BSDCon, but 
> I don't remember what the outcome was.  Hopefully Nik will chime in 
> with his thoughts along these lines.

In my perfect world the driver source code (or, at least, the NOTES
file) would have marked up information in it about what was supported.
We would then have some (mythical, and unimplemented) process that
iterated over this information, building the list of supported hardware.
This would (hopefully) make it easier for the driver authors to list
what hardware their drivers supported.

  Note:  This is *only* for the supported hardware list.  It doesn't
  apply to the rest of the release notes.

It would also let us do something like 

    http://www.BSDI.COM/products/internet/hardware/

without having to worry about the information becoming out of date.

DocBook is probably not the correct source format for this information,
as it's not specific enough to the task.  We would probably need to
create our own DTD, and then have a stylesheet that converts information
in this DTD to DocBook (in the same way that we have a stylesheet that
converts DocBook to HTML).  The markup might look something like this
(based on BSD/OS devices, since that's what I have in front of me).


    <device>
      <name>3C501 (Etherlink)</name>
      <driver>eo</driver>
      <vendor>3Com</vendor>
      <type>Ethernet</type>

      <kernelconfig>
        <port>0x320</port>
	<irq>*</irq>
	<drq>*</drq>
	<iomem>*</iomem>

	<option>FOO_BAR_BAZ</option>
      </kernelconfig>

      <comment>
        <para>Supplied, but unsupported driver.  Please use with
	  caution.</para>
      </comment>
    </device>

N
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