Hardware notes

[Simon L. Nielsen]

[Ruslan CC'ed since I suggest abusing the manual pages, and he might
have comments about that]

[Bruce wants to simplify the hardware notes, and mainly make the
hardware notes references to the section 4 manual pages]

On 2003.08.08 16:26:51 -0700, Bruce A. Mah wrote:
> If memory serves me right, Mark Linimon wrote:
> > The main problem that I see is that you can't search the document
> > (via browser or grep) to see if the blahfoo card is supported.
> > I've done that in the past to rule in, or out, something on EBay.
> 
> Yep, that's definitely a problem.  I'm not sure how to mitigate this.

Perhaps a full text search engine for the manual pages?  This could also
be useful for as a general tool.

I have been thinking a bit about the hardware notes today, and I got a
crazy idea...  If each section 4 manual page listed the supported
devices in some machine parseable way (e.g. in a seperate section?), the
device list could actually be extracted from the manual pages and used
in the release notes.  Then the actual list would only be one place for
each driver.  While it might sound a bit crazy, I actually think it
could work.  Of course it would require some work in the manual pages,
but it shouldn't be too hard.

BTW, in general I like the idea of removing the specifics in the release
notes, since duplication is almost always a bad thing, if it can be
avoided.

-- 
Simon L. Nielsen
FreeBSD Documentation Team
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