Date: Thu, 01 Oct 1998 23:21:51 +0800 From: Peter Wemm <peter@netplex.com.au> To: Poul-Henning Kamp <phk@critter.freebsd.dk> Cc: freebsd-bugs@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: kern/8015: Some sysctl descriptions for the kernel Message-ID: <199810011521.XAA18836@spinner.netplex.com.au> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Thu, 01 Oct 1998 04:40:01 MST." <199810011140.EAA22037@freefall.freebsd.org>
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Poul-Henning Kamp wrote: > The following reply was made to PR kern/8015; it has been noted by GNATS. > > From: Poul-Henning Kamp <phk@critter.freebsd.dk> > To: seggers@semyam.dinoco.de > Cc: FreeBSD-gnats-submit@FreeBSD.ORG > Subject: Re: kern/8015: Some sysctl descriptions for the kernel > Date: Thu, 01 Oct 1998 10:24:17 +0200 > > > Seeing a commit message asking for descriptions on new sysctl > >entries I thought I might add some, too. I choose the ones I could > >identify right away and knew what they were doing. > > > This is untested but I think it will work. Unfortunately we > >don't have a tool to list the comments, yet so one can't really test > >them anyway. :-( > > That was actually my dream at one point, the comment would be in > SGML and some tool would walk all over the kernel and construct > some doc from that. That was one of the things the Amiga folks had right. They had a system called 'autodocs' where there was man-page like documentation in the source itself and that was extracted and turned into some fairly respectable documentation. They eventually released the tools and I think it spat out something not too unlike texinfo. Something like this would be an excellent replacement for the section 9 manuals where you don't really need fancy markup etc. There were a number of plugins etc for various popular editors etc that you could look up docs for some function on the fly - and by doing a context sensitive lookup based on what you were editing. For example, if you were in the middle of typing a (say) tsleep(....) call, and you weren't sure of the args you could have it look up tsleep for you with a single keypress. The amiga development environment was rather different to the unix environment though as everything was graphical and a popup window for an editor was trivial. This wouldn't work too well in a vi environment. Cheers, -Peter To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-bugs" in the body of the message
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