[RTEMS Project] #2855: Next generation of RTEMS documentation

[RTEMS trac]

#2855: Next generation of RTEMS documentation
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 Reporter:  sebastian.huber  |       Owner:
     Type:  enhancement      |      Status:  new
 Priority:  normal           |   Milestone:  5.0
Component:  Documentation    |     Version:  4.12
 Severity:  normal           |  Resolution:
 Keywords:                   |
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Comment (by sebastian.huber):

 Replying to [comment:6 chrisj]:
 > Replying to [comment:5 sebastian.huber]:
 > > I propose to do the following:
 > >
 > > 1. Move the documentation back into the RTEMS sources.
 > >
 >
 > Please do not. There is more to the project's documentation than the
 kernel and doing this would result in commit churn.
 >
 > How a user uses the RSB or Eclipse is valid user documentation and it is
 not related to the kernel. Having this type of documentation in the
 unrelated kernel source repo would cause 2-way commit churn where user doc
 changes unrelated to the kernel would require buildbot rebuilds of the
 kernel and kernel changes would require documentation rebuilds.

 Is this a hard buildbot limitation? Why can't you teach buildbot that
 there are separate build systems/components in different directories? We
 don't have that many commits per second. Is this a real problem?

 I would even consider to move all parts that are required to work with
 RTEMS and that are maintained by the RTEMS project into one repository,
 e.g. the RSB and the RTEMS Tools.

 >
 > For me having the documentation source in the kernel source tree so a
 specific part of the documentation could be automatically updated is a
 questionable small gain at a larger cost. I question any formal user API
 documentation we have being automatically generated this way for a few
 reasons. It becomes difficult to audit changes because you need to de-
 reference the location in the documentation source to the location in the
 kernel source tree and I feel formal user API interfaces should be fixed
 and cannot change without careful consideration rather than being seen as
 kernel source file changes. Second, we have more than one place
 documentation can be located which means more complexity in how we
 maintain the documentation, and finally we would need to find a suitable
 format for use because there is no tool I know of that can do a suitable
 doxygen type extraction to ReST.

 For the space qualification of RTEMS SMP we have to produce a lot of
 different documents. I didn't spend much time to this topic so far, but I
 guess that without automatic generation from a common source (XML
 documents) this will be infeasible to deliver.

 >
 > > 2. Move the BSP README files to the documentation directory into the
 CPU Supplement.
 >
 > I wonder if we should have a single document for BSPs and this be a
 chapter. I do not see a need for lots of separated manuals.

 Yes, we definitely have to reduce the amount of different documents. Maybe
 we should move the BSP stuff into the getting started guide. Somewhere
 there should be a list of supported chips/boards (section) grouped by
 architecture (chapter). The quirks, build options, and so on (subsections)
 should be available for each BSP.

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Ticket URL: <http://devel.rtems.org/ticket/2855#comment:7>
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