From owner-freebsd-bugs Thu Oct 1 08:28:25 1998 Return-Path: Received: (from majordom@localhost) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.8/8.8.8) id IAA06105 for freebsd-bugs-outgoing; Thu, 1 Oct 1998 08:28:25 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from owner-freebsd-bugs@FreeBSD.ORG) Received: from spinner.netplex.com.au (spinner.netplex.com.au [202.12.86.3]) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id IAA06015 for ; Thu, 1 Oct 1998 08:28:05 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from peter@netplex.com.au) Received: from spinner.netplex.com.au (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by spinner.netplex.com.au (8.9.1/8.9.1/Spinner) with ESMTP id XAA18836; Thu, 1 Oct 1998 23:21:51 +0800 (WST) (envelope-from peter@spinner.netplex.com.au) Message-Id: <199810011521.XAA18836@spinner.netplex.com.au> X-Mailer: exmh version 2.0.2 2/24/98 To: Poul-Henning Kamp cc: freebsd-bugs@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: kern/8015: Some sysctl descriptions for the kernel In-reply-to: Your message of "Thu, 01 Oct 1998 04:40:01 MST." <199810011140.EAA22037@freefall.freebsd.org> Date: Thu, 01 Oct 1998 23:21:51 +0800 From: Peter Wemm Sender: owner-freebsd-bugs@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Poul-Henning Kamp wrote: > The following reply was made to PR kern/8015; it has been noted by GNATS. > > From: Poul-Henning Kamp > 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