On Sat, Apr 28, 2001 at 05:14:02PM -0400, Emre Yildirim wrote:

> 'user friendly' it will probably turn into Redhat or FreeBSD and the 
> mailinglist will be full with newbies who don't read the 
> documentation and/or want quick answers without doing any research.  

Well, they can't read what isn't there... :)

As for them not studying... I've given up on that.  I can't even get people to
read for 15 minutes to save me hours of pain, so I'm back to being a mean SOB
most of the time... :)

> Personally I think the man pages are sufficient for documentation.  

They are sufficient as a reference, but very poor for tying various tasks
together.  For example, the man pages for bind and sendmail don't tell you
what to do if you have a private network with a gateway via PPP and a dynamic
IP address, and no permanent DNS record.  That's pretty much going to be the
norm for a home UNIX setup.

Where is the man page for picking a non-conflicting local domain, setting up a
cacheing bind that does DNS for your local machines, and telling sendmail not
to bring up the !@#%@ network link just to send mail to a machine 3 feet away
on the private LAN?

That's a bitch of a job to figure out from the man pages.  Hell, I'm still
working on getting that right, because there really is no "official" way of
doing it.

There are a lot of tasks that need documentation which ties the various pieces
together.  

Dont' get me wrong, I love man pages and I hate it that a lot of new software
is coming out with #$@!$%$ HTML manuals instead.  But it's mostly useful as a
reference.

> But more examples on certain expert stuff would be nice. Perhaps 
> users could submit examples of complex setups to the NetBSD website 
> maintainers or something... (I would really like to see how people 
> are using IPsec with NetBSD).

Exactly.  Tackling the common things like the aforementioned home network,
various MTA setups, and similar things not easily divined from the man pages
would be nice.  Some of that is there, but it's often incomplete.

A ton of UNIX documentation is geared toward systems with permanent net
connections, and that's a huge source of pain until you get all the pieces in
your head.

> (PS: This is off topic, but is it just me or does NetBSD have less 
> security related bugs than OpenBSD?  I went to both websites to check 
> the patches for the latest releases, seems like OpenBSD has a bunch.  
> That's pretty cool :-)

OpenBSD always sounded great to me, but it just has never worked right.
NetBSD was basically install, configure, and I generally forget it is there
(it's my gateway, email, etc server).

In concept, the Linux HOWTO project is very good.  It fails in implementation
a lot, but it's still very useful.

Because NetBSD is more consitent (by a long shot), I would think a NetBSD
HOWTO system would end up much better.  The focus on tasks as opposed to
individual programs is a good idea to me.


-- 

UNIX/Perl/C/Pizza__________________________________shannon@widomaker.com