After hours of tense negotiations with the Cabal it seems that I was in error about how subarchitectures will work.
In the ensuing brouhaha, I concoted a mildly less shit scheme, I think though am not certain, for expressing hardware. In this revelatory new scheme, we'd have names like this: acorn.a5k, acorn.riscpc, acorn.archimedes, footbridge.netwinder, etc., etc., etc., etc.. We'd take the words `subarchitecture', `platform', `major', `minor', and any other cool-sounding words you can think of, and combine and permute them in various ways to describe both the first part, the latter part, and the juxtaposition of the two (say, `subarchitecture' can refer to the major part, `platform' to the minor one, whatever). We can join them with, I guess, either a dot (`.') or a hyphen (`-') or anything else anyone thinks especially appropriate. A slash would be a bad idea, I think. You can then invoke a script to spit out either of the two principal parts or their conjunction. In `update-modules', for instance, you'd apply the major aliases file first, then the full one. I imagine that for footbridge, you wouldn't even bother; you'd just have /etc/modutils/arch/arm.footbridge. In fact, apparently update-modules does this already, so long as we feed it an appropriate string. Great. However, perhaps some future freakoid Acorn-like hardware will emerge with a new sound chip. For that, you could have `alias sound vidc20' in your arm.acorn file, and `alias sound freakoidchip' in your arm.acorn.freakmachine file. There is one obvious variation to this proposed scheme: we could have three, or indeed an infinite number of parts. The follow-on variation is that no part is subordinate to each other; thus each part encodes a `capability' of the hardware, for example: `acorn.26.i2ctime.vidc1....' or something. If you think this is boring, you're right. However, while the powers that be are very clear what they /do not/ want, the only real suggestion I've had so far is `make a /proc/hardware interface', which could potentially list these sorts of `capabilities' or whatever. I did try and explain that I didn't think that was likely. I imagine everyone's thoroughly sick of me whining on about this now. If you all keep your humours active for a little while longer that would be great. If some feedback came in about what to do before I go ahead and implement something based on my brain-damaged visions, that would be even better. ;-) c.
