hal draft spec

[George]

On Thu, Sep 11, 2003 at 12:28:02AM +0200, David Zeuthen wrote:
>   <set key="Vendor" value="SomeVendor">
>   <set key="Vendor[da]" value="TheDanishNameOfTheVendor">

This is a little evil.  Note that AFAIK it presents lots of problems to
put actual text inside attributes.  What would be wrong with:

<Vendor>SomeVendor</Vendor>
<Vendor xml:lang="da">TheDanishNameOfTheVendor</Vendor>

That's both more XMLish and I find it more logical or perhaps a bit closer to
your version:

<set key="Vendor">SomeVendor</set>
<set key="Vendor" xml:lang="da">TheDanishNameOfTheVendor</set>

> This should be easy to parse. It's probably pretty inefficient too in
> terms of storage and driver searching cost due to the quite simple
> format yielding many drivers :-) 

That's just the ondisk format, that can be inefficient.  Plus I doubt
you'll notice unless there's way too many entries.

> And it's probably useful to look into the discover format from Progeny -
> they have done quite some thinking on device-info files.

That's probably worth some investigation ...

George

-- 
George <jirka at 5z.com>
   You can't say civilization isn't advancing: in every war they kill you
   in a new way.
                       -- Will Rogers