Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id ; Mon, 5 Nov 2001 13:32:41 -0500 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id ; Mon, 5 Nov 2001 13:32:31 -0500 Received: from cx97923-a.phnx3.az.home.com ([24.9.112.194]:17546 "EHLO grok.yi.org") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id ; Mon, 5 Nov 2001 13:32:14 -0500 Message-ID: <3BE6DA52.6040100@candelatech.com> Date: Mon, 05 Nov 2001 11:28:34 -0700 From: Ben Greear Organization: Candela Technologies User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:0.9.4) Gecko/20011019 Netscape6/6.2 X-Accept-Language: en-us MIME-Version: 1.0 To: dalecki@evision.ag CC: Stephen Satchell , "Albert D. Cahalan" , Jakob =?ISO-8859-1?Q?=D8stergaard?= , Alex Bligh - linux-kernel , Alexander Viro , John Levon , linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, Daniel Phillips , Tim Jansen Subject: Re: PROPOSAL: dot-proc interface [was: /proc stuff] In-Reply-To: <200111042213.fA4MDoI229389@saturn.cs.uml.edu> <4.3.2.7.2.20011105080435.00bc7620@10.1.1.42> <3BE6DCCD.8A7CE033@evision-ventures.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Martin Dalecki wrote: > Stephen Satchell wrote: > >>At 12:23 PM 11/5/01 +0100, Martin Dalecki wrote: >> >>>Every BASTARD out there telling the world, that parsing ASCII formatted >>>files >>>is easy should be punished to providing a BNF definition of it's syntax. >>>Otherwise I won't trust him. Having a struct {} with a version field, >>>indicating >>>possible semantical changes wil always be easier faster more immune >>>to errors to use in user level programs. >>> >>I would love for the people who write the code that generates the /proc >>info to be required to document the layout of the information. The best >>place for that documentation is the source, and in English or other >>accepted human language, in a comment block. Not in "header lines" or >>other such nonsense. I don't need no stinkin' BNF, just a reasonable I would rather have a header block, as well as docs in the source. If the header cannot easily explain it, then the header can have a URL or other link to the full explanation. I don't expect to be able to parse every /proc interface with a single tool, but I would like to be able to easily parse individual ones with perl, sscanf, etc... Ben -- Ben Greear President of Candela Technologies Inc http://www.candelatech.com ScryMUD: http://scry.wanfear.com http://scry.wanfear.com/~greear - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/