Name
Property description — Provide a textual description for an option.
Synopsis
cdl_option <name> { description <text> … }
Description
Users can only be expected to manipulate configuration options
sensibly if they are given sufficient information about these options.
There are three properties which serve to explain an option in plain
text: the display property gives a textual alias for an option,
which is usually more comprehensible than something like
CYGPKG_LIBC_TIME_ZONES
; the description property
gives a longer description, typically a paragraph or so; the doc
property specifies the location of additional on-line documentation
related to a configuration option. In the context of a graphical tool
the display string will be the primary way for users to identify
configuration options; the description paragraph will be visible
whenever the option is selected; the on-line documentation will only
be accessed when the user explicitly requests it.
At present there is no way of providing any sort of formatting mark-up in a description. It is possible that future versions of the configuration tools will provide some control over the way the description text gets rendered.
Example
cdl_option CYGDBG_INFRA_DEBUG_TRACE_MESSAGE { display "Use trace text" default_value 1 description " All trace calls within eCos contain a text message which should give some information about the circumstances. These text messages will end up being embedded in the application image and hence there is a significant penalty in terms of image size. It is possible to suppress the use of these messages by disabling this option. This results in smaller code size, but there is less human-readable information available in the trace output, possibly only filenames and line numbers." }
2024-03-18 | Open Publication License |