The content here comprises the documentation for the DCI 4 network stack on RISC OS. The content uses the PRM-in-XML format, and has been converted from the original textual and HTML documents. By being in an open source format, editable as text, and able to be stored in a git repository, it brings the maintenance of documentation to users.
The documentation has been converted raw, and then reorganised to structure the information in a form closer to that used by the RISC OS Programmer's Reference Manuals.
The documentation was originally copyight Acorn/ANT. Acorn had concerns that the information might be used to subvert school systems. This concern, together with the inability to obtain any clear answer on the reproduction rights for the documentation, has left the documentation in limbo for many years.
After many years, the ownership of the original Acorn licensed content has fallen to RISC OS Developments.
The DCI statistics and MBufManager have a license statement that is similar to an open source MIT license, so they are distributable. The DCI device driver documentation was an Acorn document so falls entirely under the purview of RISC OS Developments.
The documentation builds on Linux and macOS at present. Although individual documents should work on RISC OS, the makefiles that build the content are not set up for building on such systems.
To build the content on an Ubuntu system (other distributions may work but are not regularly used), run the command:
./build.sh
The content will be generated into the output directory. To enable the building of PDFs, use:
env PRINCEXML_I_HAVE_A_LICENSE=1 ./build.sh
Using PrinceXML to generate PDFs for non-commercial use is free. Consult license documentation for other cases.
The build process will use a configured release version of the PRM-in-XML tools, which it will download if necessary. It is possible to override the version used by setting the environment variable PRMINXML_VERSION to the release version to use. It may also be set to the value local to use the locally installed version of PRM-in-XML tools.
The files can be validated with the command:
./build.sh lint
This will report problems to the screen and a full log in the logs directory.