Hi Paul,
Yes definitely there is an interest. I will make a little bit of history right
now. When the first version of comanche went out I was storing this
information in a format like:
{directive}
{name} {UseCanonicalName} {1\.[3-9]+.*|[2-9]\.[0-9]+.*} {.*}
{object} {Boolean} {{label} {Use canonical name?} }
{scope} {sconfig vhost}
{help} {}
{/directive}
and I had to do that by hand, directive by directive...
Stefano Mazzochi, from java-pache was looking for a way of improving the
configuration of their project. He proposed to create some kind of common
standard in which the sintax, default values of directives, etc could
be expresed. Agreeing in that common format would ease the lifes of
developers. I agreed with him. He matured the idea an contacted Eric
Prud'hommeaux from W3C at ApacheCon. We had an informal meeting there
and Eric is working right now on a XML/RDF based solution.
He set up a mailing list:
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
If you want to get on that list send a mail to him at [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Another concern was how to actually automate that information and that if it
could actually be extracted from the modules source code. Brian Behlendorf
said he would consider which changes would be necessary.
One more thought here: I think we could automate that but not only for the
GUI, but also for the documentation. If in some way each module could
describe himself or, like Paul says, come with a file that describes the
sintax, example, etc then documentation could be automated.
Now the documentation is something like that:
Syntax: AddAltByType string MIME-type MIME-type ...
Context: server config, virtual host, directory, .htaccess
Override: Indexes
Status: Base
Module: mod_autoindex
This sets the alternate text to display for a file, instead of an icon, for
FancyIndexing. MIME-type is a valid
content-type, such as text/html. String is enclosed in double quotes (").
This alternate text is displayed if the client
is image-incapable or has image loading disabled.
The idea would be to have something like that
<module>
<name>mod_autoindex</name>
<directive>
<name>AddAltByType</name>
<sintax> <some standard way of descrbing taht sintax here> </sintax>
<context>
<el>server_config</el>
<el>virtual_host</el>
<el>directory</el>
<el>.htaccess</el>
</context>
<override>
<el>indexes</el>
<override>
<status>Base</status>
</directive>
<comment>
This sets the alternate text to displa (...)
</comment>
</module>
Then the server documentation for directives could be automatically generated
and converted to html or txt or some other format
Example:
I want to include online help for comanche and right now either I write my own
help or I have to load the html page and point to the appropiate part.
If we had this already working, I could just write my own converter and
choose to create individual help files in html format for each directive.
Best regards
Daniel
PS: My last post seems not to have been archived. For anyone interested you
can get a development version of comanche at
http://comanche.com.dtu.dk/comanche
--
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Daniel Lopez Ridruejo "Audaces fortuna juvat"
E-Mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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