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Re: assembler man pages ?


On Tuesday 06 September 2005 02:22 pm, Jim Blandy wrote:
> Mike Frysinger <vapier@gentoo.org> writes:
> > for example, say i wanted quick info on the 'jne' instruction, i would do
> > `man jne` and get back a reference page similar to `man 2 close`
>
> But it's a question of pragmatics: what's the interface, what's the
> structure, and how do you get the information into it?  You'd pretty
> much need to have chip vendors cooperating with you, because nobody's
> going to retype all that.  It's boring enough doing the opcodes
> library and the GCC machine description.

of the different ways i imagined tackling the issue, here's the two i think 
are most feasible:
- integrate with binutils documentation/source code in an effort to keep down 
duplicated information in multiple places ... maybe something like using 
doxygen to turn comments placed around opcode definitions in the binutils 
source into manpages, or adding on to the current texinfo sources ...
- define a simple xml format and use like xsl to translate into 
man/html/whatever and startup a sourceforge project to maintain it ... the 
benefit here would be a much lower learning curve for random people to 
contribute

the former i would need help with since ive never screwed around with texinfo 
source before not to mention i'd need to get the blessing of the larger 
binutils community to make it happen :)

either approach would be a 'document as i go' because as you rightly point 
out, this kind of project is really really boring to tackle beyond a few 
opcodes at a time
-mike


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