Re: [docbook-tc] Request to add effectivity attribute

[Nancy P Harrison <nancyph@us.ibm.com>]

Hi Steve,

Are you using all the effectivity attributes
for something at this point?  If not, could you alias one of the others
to use for this?   We had a very similar issue, and we did decide
to include word size, where necessary, in the 'os' attributes.  Are
you saying you would need to have them in both sets of attributes, os and
arch or in one of them?  I"m not sure I understand why they would
need to be in both, since they really are an architecture iss rather than
specifically an OS one. I mean, if you have a Sparc-9-64 architecure, could
it be running either a 32- or 64-bit version of Solaris?

regards,

Nancy


_______
Nancy P Harrison
Rational Software, IBM Software Group
20 Maguire Rd., Lexington MA 02421
Phone: 781-676-2535
nancyph@us.ibm.com

Steve Cogorno <Steven.Cogorno@Sun.Com>

04/13/2004 07:35 PM

Please respond to
Steve Cogorno

To	docbook-tc@lists.oasis-open.org
cc
Subject	[docbook-tc] Request to add effectivity attribute

Members of the TC:

We've recently found that the effectivity attributes are not quite enough
to 
differentiate between some of the platform and architecture combinations
that 
wee need to support.  Sun would like to request an addition to the
effectivity 
attributes in order to identify this content.

We currently use OS and Arch to label text for our different platforms
and
operating systems.  In the past we've used the OS attribute to differentiate
32-bit and 64-bit operating systems. However this isn't really the correct
place for 32/64 bit.  As our list of operating systems and architectures
the
permutations are too complex for the existing attributes.

We'd like to propose the addition of a new attribute called wordsize that
would indicate the word size for the architecture.

Here is an example of our attribute values:


OS                  Arch  
             WordSize

Solaris             SPARCv9    
        32
HP-UX               AMD    
            64
Windows             x86
Linux               PowerPC-403
                    MIPS


While I hesitate to add a new attribute, the only alternative is for us
to
cram the word size into the existing attributes:


OS                  Arch

Solaris             SPARCv9
Solaris-32          SPARCv9-32
Solaris-64          SPARCv9-64
HP-UX               AMD
HP-UX-32            AMD-32
HP-UX-64            AMD-64
Windows             x86
Windows-32          x86-32
Windows-64          x86-64
Linux               PowerPC-403
Linux-32            PowerPC-403-32
Linux-64            PowerPC-403-64
                    MIPS
                    MIPS-32
                    MIPS-64


This alternative can lead to ambiguous markup and confusing generated text.
We'd like to avoid that by using a third attribute.


If you have any comments on this proposal please let me know.

Thanks!


Steve Cogorno
Sun Microsystems



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