From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: arend@broadcom.com (Arend van Spriel) Date: Mon, 29 Jul 2013 11:19:10 +0200 Subject: [Ksummit-2013-discuss] DT bindings as ABI [was: Do we have people interested in device tree janitoring / cleanup?] In-Reply-To: References: <20130725175702.GC22291@e106331-lin.cambridge.arm.com> <2007664.vYsECFSKrV@flatron> <51F39FD8.6080808@broadcom.com> <2460092.aLmjrOVh1g@flatron> <51F3A82E.2000907@broadcom.com> Message-ID: <51F6338E.8020101@broadcom.com> To: linux-arm-kernel@lists.infradead.org List-Id: linux-arm-kernel.lists.infradead.org On 07/27/2013 10:01 PM, jonsmirl at gmail.com wrote: > On Sat, Jul 27, 2013 at 3:45 PM, Grant Likely wrote: >> On Sat, Jul 27, 2013 at 4:59 AM, Arend van Spriel wrote: >>> Let's see how many people go and scream if I say this: Too bad .dts files >>> are not done using XML format as DT bindings could be described using XML >>> Schema. >> >> Draft an example and show us how it would look! :-) There is >> absolutely nothing preventing us from expressing a DT in XML format, >> or even using XSLT to define DT schema while still using our current >> .dts syntax. It would be trivial to do lossless translation between >> .dts syntax and xml. >> >> The problem that I have with XML and XSLT is that it is very verbose >> and not entirely friendly to mere-mortals. However, I'm more than >> willing to be proved wrong on this point. > > I considered this approach a while ago and discarded it. It would work > but it is just too much of a Frankenstein monster. Ah, but he is so cute. At least I do not think it is more monstrous as the bindings files. I just browsed through a couple of arm binding files as I felt challenged to come up with an example. I did not get the impression that there is some kind of template in place to get consitent bindings descriptions. > Much cleaner to modify dtc to take a schema as part of the compilation > process. The schema language itself has no requirement to look like > DTS syntax. Whoever wrote dtc probably has a favorite language that > would be good for writing schemas in. Not sure if I can follow here. I guess you mean the dts compilation, right? There are tools freely available to validate XML files against XSD specification files. As an example libxml2 has support for it. I suspect it is not desired to have a dependency for DTC with an out-of-tree library, but it could be incorporated and have DTC spew the validation results. Regards, Arend