Hardware notes

[Tom Rhodes]

On Fri, 08 Aug 2003 09:30:04 -0700
bmah at freebsd.org (Bruce A. Mah) wrote:

> Hi all--
> 
> Here's a crazy idea for the hardware notes...hopefully it won't turn 
> into a huge bikeshed.
> 
> 
> I propose to gut out the "supported devices" section of the hardware
> notes, down to the level of device drivers in most cases.  So instead of
> trying to give an exhaustive list of devices supported, we'd list a
> class of device (e.g. "DEC/Intel 21143 Fast Ethernet controllers and
> compatibles"), a pointer to the manpage, and some remarks.  Essentially
> the hardware notes would become an annotated list of pointers to device
> drivers (plus the platform-specific information, which would remain
> intact).  It would become (remain?) incumbent on the manual pages to
> have lists of individual devices...most of them do this anyways.

My thoughts on this, which have been kicked around over and over again
in my mind, are similar.  My idea was:

List class
  List description (small)
    Tell user to review said manual page.
      Plea to developers/manual page authors to list supported devices
      in the appropriate manual page.

This would perhaps make it easier for users to figure out if their
devices are supported or not.

> 
> A disadvantage is that if someone has a random device (where they don't
> know anything about it other than its name), it's not immediately
> obvious what driver would support it.  Perhaps more descriptive
> annotations would help here.

Where I put (small) for the description, you could list that:

USB Devices
  umass(4)
    Driver for USB mass storage devices, zip drives, USB hard drives, etc.

Or perhaps this could be the other way around:

USB Devices:
  Mass storage, zip drives, USB hard drives, etc.
    See the umass(4) manual page for a complete description.

> 
> Thoughts?

See above, perhaps you and I are on a different wavelink but this
sounds like a good idea which should be fleshed out.

-- 
Tom Rhodes