Re: PROPOSAL: dot-proc interface [was: /proc stuff]

Ben Greear
2001-11-05T18:32:41Z

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 <greearb@candelatech.com> <Ben_Greear AT excite.com>
President of Candela Technologies Inc http://www.candelatech.com
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