Re: drm.4 man page and import of X11 drm-kms.7 and al.

[tlaronde%kergis.com@localhost]

On Wed, Oct 18, 2023 at 10:35:26AM +0000, Taylor R Campbell wrote:
> 
> > There is no man page for drmkms (the kernel part), but there are man
> > pages in the X sources, in the rst format
> > (external/mit/libdrm/dist/man/drm-kms.7.rst) with a bunch of related
> > resources that provide a view of the DRI thing (from the X POV).
> > 
> > There is rst2man-3.10 (pkgsrc py310-docutils) to convert these to man
> > pages.
> > 
> > Should this be done (it is the X11/DRI interface, not the kernel one, so
> > should reside in the X11R7 realm)?
> 
> It might be reasonable to ship libdrm man pages in /usr/X11R7/man but
> we would need to import the pregenerated rst2man output into
> xsrc/external.  Not hard in principle but somewhat annoying to deal
> with.  That said, a cursory skim suggests there's a lot missing here.
> I see a lot of API functions cross-referenced, but I don't see their
> documentation here?  So I'm not sure how useful this would be.

What exists is probably better than nothing and, at the very least,
drm-kms.7 gives a (part) of the view---unfortunately, a comment in the
old version in a header was giving a view of what was wanted on the
kernel side, not mentionned in drm-kms7, but I didn't find the equivalent
in the new sources (and the documentation provided on the Web by
the Linux team is not up-to-date either---there are for example
mentions of drmP.h that doesn't exist anymore).

So I'm for providing what exists, once more for programmer writing X11
clients (the kernel part is another problem).
-- 
        Thierry Laronde <tlaronde +AT+ kergis +dot+ com>
                     http://www.kergis.com/
                    http://kertex.kergis.com/
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