[Coco] NitrOS-9 Technical Reference

[Gene Heskett]

On Saturday 05 April 2014 17:33:56 Greg Law did opine:

> I just finished splitting the NitrOS-9 Technical Reference on the
> NitrOS-9 wiki page
> (https://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/nitros9/index.php?title=NitrOS-
> 9_Technical_Reference) into sections organized by chapter. When you
> click the link, you’ll be taken to essentially the table of contents
> in which you can click through to any of the available chapters. Also
> note that when you click on the System Calls chapters, all system
> calls, get status codes, and set status codes are broken out into
> individual pages. This means F$Link is on a page by itself.
> 
> I did it this way for a few reasons:
> 
> Although the NitrOS-9 Technical Reference is rather small in book
> standards, it’s huge in wiki standards and takes a long time to save
> in the bulk format primarily because wiki software has to diff the
> changes on every save (and some diff algorithms are less efficient than
> others).
> 
> I think this gives a somewhat cleaner organization that lets us focus on
> a specific section (although I admit this may not be so great if you
> want to read the whole thing from top to bottom) and it makes finding
> and editing a lot easier.
> 
> The most important reason in my mind is that it lets me break out links
> to system calls and status codes across all pages in the wiki. For
> example, I$Read and F$Link in the kernel chapter now actually link to
> the system calls and I plan to extend these links to other pages as
> appropriate.
> 
> One thing you’ll notice is that there are a lot of dead links on the
> System Calls page. This is because I initially created all links to the
> pages based on the OS9Defs file (or os9.d as it is named now). I
> included all of the SS.* codes in both the GetStatus and SetStatus
> sections and then filled in the pages based on whatever documentation I
> could find. The next step is to go through all the code to find out
> where these are defined and then to put together the missing
> documentation based on the actual implementation in the code.
> 
> Once this finished (and it’ll take a while to root through the code),
> I’ll remove any dead links (links to GetStatus code that exist only
> as SetStatus and vice versa) or add annotations that these apparently
> don’t exist (so the documentation matches os9.d).
> 
> On another note, does anyone know of a way to preprocess the defs files
> with the actual values emitted in the assembler listing? I was hoping I
> could use lwasm –l –P os9.d or mamou –p –l os9.d to have it
> emit the RMB values so I don’t have to do it by hand, but I haven’t
> been able find the magic incantation to make either assembler to do
> this. This would make it significantly easier to pull out documentation
> for the remainder of the defs files.

Get rid of anything that even resembles an ifp1, then it should assemble 
for the listing.  ISTR doing that yonks ago when I needed a listing of the 
errno's.

Back on subject, I know this has been a huge amount of work and I gladly 
tip my hat to anyone who undertakes to bring modern indexing into it.  
Thank you very much Greg.

> 
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Cheers, Gene
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