From owner-freebsd-current Mon Dec 8 14:22:27 1997 Return-Path: Received: (from root@localhost) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.7/8.8.7) id OAA20566 for current-outgoing; Mon, 8 Dec 1997 14:22:27 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from owner-freebsd-current) Received: from godzilla.zeta.org.au (godzilla.zeta.org.au [203.2.228.19]) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.7/8.8.7) with ESMTP id OAA20498; Mon, 8 Dec 1997 14:22:09 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from andrew@ZETA.ORG.AU) Received: from gurney.reilly.home (d66.syd2.zeta.org.au [203.26.11.66]) by godzilla.zeta.org.au (8.8.7/8.6.9) with ESMTP id JAA03730; Tue, 9 Dec 1997 09:10:28 +1100 Received: (from andrew@localhost) by gurney.reilly.home (8.8.7/8.8.5) id IAA10768; Tue, 9 Dec 1997 08:28:15 +1100 (EST) From: Andrew Reilly Message-Id: <199712082128.IAA10768@gurney.reilly.home> Date: Tue, 9 Dec 1997 08:28:15 +1100 (EST) Subject: Re: VM system info To: toor@dyson.iquest.net cc: perhaps@yes.no, dyson@FreeBSD.ORG, current@FreeBSD.ORG In-Reply-To: <199712080151.UAA00245@dyson.iquest.net> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/plain; CHARSET=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-current@FreeBSD.ORG X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk On 7 Dec, John S. Dyson wrote: > Eivind Eklund said: >> >> I want this info in the kernel. At the very least, I want >> documentation as a part of the SYSCTL_*() macro parameters, unused but >> available as a (mandatory) part of the source - better would be as a >> part of the kernel that can be compiled away by setting a kernel >> option (e.g. NO_SYSCTL_DOCS). >> > The biggest problem with that is the size of the "documentation." I > agree that it would be a good idea to document everything. Internally > would be nice (I guess), because it would tend to stay better in sync. > Some kind of literate programming scheme would be interesting also. I've been thinking about this for a while, but haven't arrived at the "perfect" solution yet. Literate programming is definitely good: possibly the only solution to this sort of problem. The devil is in the details, of course. How about a kern-doc compiler that filters through the kernel source as part of the build process, and compiles all of the sysctl doco into an HTML tree, with the appropriate links to man pages. This could just be put somewhere in the file system, or, for extra points, compiled into the kernel itself as an MFS image that could be accessed with the appropriate tweaks to mount_mfs. (Or something much simpler, since you only read read-only, world-access semantics.) -- Andrew "The steady state of disks is full." -- Ken Thompson