On Thu, Aug 27, 2015 at 10:23 PM, Matt Porter <mporter@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > During the Device Tree microconference at Linux Plumbers 2015, we had > a short discussion about how to improve DT Binding Documentation. A > number of issues were raised (again, as these things have been > discussed in the past) including: > > * Inconsistency between binding documents due to prose text > format. > * Inability to reliably machine read bindings for mass update > or search. > * Bit rot of bindings as new conventions are agreed upon but > only new bindings are changed. > > Grant Likely probably summed up the issue best with "...as long as > bindings are human readable, we'll have issues...". I'd rephrase that to "... as long as bindings are not machine readable, we'll have issues...". Human readable and machine readable are not mutually exclusive. XML is not, IMHO, human readable, but YAML looks pretty good, so I think it's a good choice. > The context > of that comment was, of course, regarding our current documents > written in very inconsistent prose style. When the topic of needing > the bindings in a rigid format was raised, there was general head > nodding that this was needed. It was noted that this has been > discussed many times before and nothing has been done. > > My proposed solution to the problem is to convert all DT bindings > a rigid text markup format. In choosing a text markup language my > requirements were: > > 1) Human readable > 2) Well documented > 3) Easy to translate to other data formats > 4) Well supported by tools and libraries > > After looking at a number of markup options, YAML stood out as the > one that meets all of these requirements. The YAML syntax is adopted > in many projects specifically because of the high level of readability. > A comprehensive spec is at http://www.yaml.org/spec/1.2/spec.html. > There's a number of tools to convert between YAML and other popular > data formats such as JSON and XML. XML was cited by Behan Webster > during the microconference as an important data format as the type > of developers that may produce comprehensive DTS Binding validation > tools will want to use XML. Every major scripting language has a > high level binding to the low level libyaml C library to facilitate > handling of YAML data files. > > One caveat with YAML is it does not tolerate tabs. Yes, I said it. > No tabs! This can be managed with proper editor modes and also with > helper scripts to strip tabs to aid in people passing planned > checkpatch.pl checks that would run YAML DT Binding specific tag > validators for new bindings. This will be an endless source of pain. Based on your examples, it looks like we only need a very small subset of YAML. I'd be willing to write a parser for the language, but we might lose the ability to do conversions to other formats. It depends on how comprehensive and automatic the helper scripts to strip tabs would be. > > The scope of the initial YAML DT Binding format was specifically > limited to supporting *only* the content we have in bindings today. > The idea here is to propose and agree on something that will take > us just a few steps in the right direction. If we move *all* current > binding content to a machine parseable format, additional features > can be added with more automation and scripting. As it stands today, > because of the inconsistency of the wording of the files, we can't > add a lot of new features to the content until we convert what we > have today into a standard format. > > With that said, it should be noted that some new features such as > "type" tags to indicate cell types could be added to support > additional DTS validation beyond what the current content supports. > Another possibility is adding "range" type information to validate > the legal values for a cell. I would recommend we add type and something for value constraints. Even if we don't add populate those immediately, I think thinking through some of the possible uses will be helpful to avoid doing something dumb. 'choices' or 'enums' seem frequently used. I see lots of "must be one of..." in the binding docs I read. Another important thing to document would be a 'superclass' or 'inherit-from' attribute, for things that are of a specific type (i2c, regulator, clock, etc.) > This series is broken up into three major parts: > > 1) The documentation defining the YAML DT binding format > 2) A skeleton device binding example illustrating use of this format > 3) Some real binding conversions (eeprom.txt, phy-bindings.txt, and > ti-phy.txt > > As a proof of concept of what can be done with a proper machine > readable DT binding source file, there's a simple markdown document > generator at https://github.com/konsulko/dtgendoc. Also, to see > actual output from the generator, the generated markdown from those > bindings is viewable at https://github.com/konsulko/dtgendoc/wiki > > There's a lot of other possibilities for validation tools using > only the data we have today in the bindings. In addition, Frank > Rowand covered some DT debug techniques that would benefit from > the binding documentation being 100% reliably searchable. > > I found it useful to see a side-by-side view of a converted doc > versus the original content, so here's a screenshot of eeprom.txt > vs. eeprom.yaml: > https://github.com/konsulko/dtgendoc/wiki#eepromtxt-vs-eepromyaml > > When we decide on a text markup format that is acceptable, then the > next step is to convert all the bindings. That process would start > with the complete set of generic bindings as they will be referenced > by the actual device bindings. Although there are a lot of files to convert, I think the job is manageable, and can be done with conversion sprints at conferences and the like. You don't have to be a kernel 'C' coder to do a conversion, so I think a lot of non-traditional contributers can help out. I'm already thinking about what could be done at an Embedded Linux Conference. One thing that would help would be a conversion guide. It would have things like: "if you see this type of language, put that in the description, some examples are ..." I'll have more comments on individual patches. -- Tim -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe devicetree" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
