[HN Gopher] FreeBSD Handbook Improvement Survey
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FreeBSD Handbook Improvement Survey
Author : rdpintqogeogsaa
Score : 65 points
Date : 2022-04-17 12:15 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (marc.info)
(TXT) w3m dump (marc.info)
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| Too bad that this happens on the mailing list. Having a web
| survey would be much more conducive to mass participation.
| Koshkin wrote:
| Conducive to mass "BSD is dying" trolling, BSD vs. Linux
| flamewar and such.
| throwawaybsd wrote:
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| Not really. I am a daily user of FreeBSD, it is my main
| driver.
|
| However I am not on the mailing list. I hate mailing lists,
| they clutter my mailbox and I consider them an inefficient
| way of discussing. I prefer things like IRC that are more
| direct. And anonymous, which is also important these days.
| Signing up for a public mailing list like this is inviting a
| wave of spam. Sure I can make a spare google mail box or
| protonmail or whatever but that makes it even harder to
| access the mailing list.
|
| I would participate in this survey if I didn't have to sign
| up for the mailing list. So it is deterring at least one
| daily FreeBSD user as well :)
| 1over137 wrote:
| >I would participate in this survey if I didn't have to
| sign up for the mailing list.
|
| You don't. In fact the instructions ask specifically that
| you don't reply to the list. To participate you just need
| to email that poster.
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| Ah ok fair enough, I didn't see that. Just looked for a
| link to click. In that case I'll participate!
| johnklos wrote:
| Isn't it nice when good documentation is treated as more than an
| afterthought? This is good to see :)
| vipermoney wrote:
| Judging by the massive amount of unfixed bug reports linked in
| this email, doesn't it seem like documentation _has been_ an
| afterthought for them for a long time?
|
| Does anyone have a comparison for OpenBSD or NetBSD's
| documentation having outdated or incorrect info?
| the_only_law wrote:
| NetBSD documentation is just straight up missing sometimes.
| iirc a lot of kernel interfaces are both missing
| documentation and are different than other BSDs. You either
| need dig through the source or ask for help.
| 1over137 wrote:
| Is that really such a massive number of bug reports, for a
| project as large as FreeBSD? I'm not convinced.
| vipermoney wrote:
| Perhaps it's not as large as you think, relatively
| speaking. If we take a look at bugs.freebsd.org, it seems
| that many bug reports are opened and left to rot for years.
| The documentation section of the tracker is no exception.
|
| https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/page.cgi?id=showreport.ht
| m...
|
| Seems to be getting worse with time too.
| 1over137 wrote:
| >many bug reports are opened and left to rot for years
|
| Yup. This is common for many project, like llvm:
| https://github.com/llvm/llvm-project/issues
| fegu wrote:
| I have a FreeBSD certification gained from an exam at EuroBSDCon
| some years (many years actually) ago. FreeBSD is great, and we
| still run it at work. Great docs is part of the reason we like
| it.
|
| (Btw this page is extremely annoying to read on mobile. I get
| that we like the no frills console 1337 vibes, but usability is
| perhaps even higher?)
| erk__ wrote:
| The official archive seems to be a bit better
| https://lists.freebsd.org/archives/freebsd-announce/2022-Apr...
| srl wrote:
| I'm baffled. Is there some broader context that makes this make
| sense? From what I can tell, this fellow (the one sending the
| email) is being paid money to develop priorities for updating the
| FreeBSD handbook. His response is to send an email to the
| /announcement/ mailing list, with a list of all the relevant bug
| reports he could find, asking others to do his job for him?
|
| A reasonable survey to send around might be "how often do you use
| the FreeBSD docs?" "How often do you notice errors in section 1?
| Section 2? Section 3?" That's not what this is. It's "here's a
| specific error, and I'm gonna run a /poll/ to figure out what the
| priority on fixing it is".
|
| Even ignoring the "that's why we hired /you/" component---this
| must be a singularly ineffective way to gain reliable
| information. Very few people are going to reply (because each of
| the ~100 questions is rather technical!). The responses are
| therefore going to be self-selected to... I don't know, whoever
| has the time and will to waste on this.
| hereforphone wrote:
| Interesting use of slashes
| thijsvandien wrote:
| This is a common way of expressing italics in plain text. Not
| that it's needed on HN, because here one can use asterisks
| and get _actual italics_.
| [deleted]
| blackhaz wrote:
| What is also baffling is the new state of the FreeBSD Handbook.
| I am a newcomer, so my voice probably doesn't matter much -
| I've been running FreeBSD since 9 as my primary desktop. The
| Handbook was a neat collection of formatted HTML pages. The
| contents section was where you'd expect it - at the top.
| Typography, code colors, vertical and horizontal indents were
| all well-thought - it was easy to find the stuff you need fast.
| The person(s) who made it were concentrated on delivering
| information.
|
| The new Handbook is really bad. The contents in split HTMLs is
| on the left, but then there is another contents section on the
| right. There contents in single HTML is on the right (why?)
| Typography is a weak mix of serif and sans-serif and italics in
| illogical places. Interline spacing is bad - the feeling is
| that instead of a reference book we are now looking at a poorly
| designed advertisemsent brochure, but still structured as a
| book. Chapters, sections and subsections are poorly demarcated
| - you can't tell when things end and new things begin.
| Horizontal and vertical indents separating coherent blocks of
| text are all broken - you simply can't easily find the
| information you need.
|
| Maybe I'm an old fart, and I like Beastie more than this soul-
| less flat demon, but I think the new person in charge of the
| Handbook is concentrated on "design" more than on the content.
| Sorry for the off-topic, fellas. Just needed to get it out.
| jessermeyer wrote:
| The discord community seems acutely aware of this. When I
| first became acquainted with the system last year I made an
| effort to document my confusion when hitting roadblocks after
| reading the handbook to them, and most of them came down to
| usability issues with the implementation of the pages. The
| response was always the same "we know, and thanks for the
| report."
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| That's the equivalent of "we'll get back to you". If they
| know and not doing anything about it they're not doing
| their job.
|
| That's not so bad for a free project but if they pay
| someone to do it that sounds like a bigger problem.
|
| Edit: In reply to the comment below which I can't reply to:
| Someone else mentioned the person doing the server was
| being paid for the work on the handbook.
| bartekrutkowski wrote:
| carlavilla wrote:
| Hi,
|
| Thanks for your feedback. I'm the responsible of the new
| design. Can you please contact with me? I'm looking to
| improve the design.
|
| carlavilla@FreeBSD.org
|
| This night I'll update the post with a brief explanation.
| Decabytes wrote:
| How much overlap is there between OpenBSD, FreeBSD, and NetBSD?
| Like can I use the FreeBSD one to learn how to use the other
| BSDs?
| protomyth wrote:
| In a general sense, and a lot of commands are the same, but
| they are very different for a lot of stuff.
|
| Compare https://docs.freebsd.org/en/books/handbook/ to
| https://www.openbsd.org/faq/index.html and you can see the
| large differences.
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| Not really. They have the same origins but totally different
| focus and have been apart for so long that they are
| substantially different.
|
| Though they borrow stuff from each other. And even Linux does
| (OpenSSH for example comes from OpenBSD).
|
| In general FreeBSD is a great allrounder with up to date
| packages. OpenBSD is very focused on security and it's pretty
| minimalist as a result though you can install what you want.
| NetBSD strives to support as many hardware platforms as
| possible so it's a good choice for that weird old server you
| found on ebay. They had more similar goals in the past but this
| is how they've diversified (at least how I see it!)
|
| Besides these focus differences there's also some personalities
| behind the different BSDs that make Linus look like a kitten :)
| So that tends to influence people's OS of choice as well. I
| don't want to get involved in that but I wanted to give the
| heads-up because it will come up in discussions once you start
| looking into the BSDs.
| chalst wrote:
| I kind of think NetBSD doesn't so much 'strive' to support
| many platforms as try to pursue simplicity of implementation
| and so be easy to port. Linux supports a lot of platforms,
| but porting Linux is a much more heroic effort.
|
| The NetBSD codebase is nice for studying operating system
| concepts.
| spijdar wrote:
| This isn't a direct answer, but I think it'll help understand
| their relationship/how similar they're likely to be.
|
| All of the above are descendants of an OS that Berkeley
| released called "BSD". BSD only ran on PDP-11s, and then, VAX
| minicomputers, with a few proprietary ports to expensive
| workstations (SunOS, Sony NEWS, etc).
|
| The code was a "distribution" of modifications on top of AT&T
| UNIX, so it couldn't be freely shared to people without a UNIX
| license. So the developers released part of their own code
| separately, the most important released called "Net/2".
|
| Two alumni of Berkeley worked on expanding the free
| distribution to be 1) a full OS and 2) run on regular Intel
| 80386 PC clones. This was called "386BSD".
|
| The last "official" BSD was 4.4BSD, which had the goal of wider
| software and hardware compatibility, adding support for a wide
| range of computers.
|
| Disagreements with the developers of 386BSD led to a fork,
| eventually named "FreeBSD" (as in Free86BSD, I think). They
| continued the goal of a PC compatible BSD.
|
| Another group took 386BSD and reintegrated 4.4BSD code back in,
| continuing the Berkeley goal of "wide hardware compatibility",
| which became NetBSD. "Internal disagreements" eventually led to
| one of the core developers leaving to make OpenBSD, which
| differed in that the development source repository was always
| publicly available (at the time NetBSD only released source for
| a full release, only team members could pull from the CVS
| repo).
|
| All that to say, FreeBSD is sort of its own thing, with NetBSD
| and OpenBSD sharing much more. They've all diverged quite a
| bit, but have simultaneously shared a lot of code (especially
| things like device drivers).
|
| So, broadly speaking, using any BSD will make you "familiar
| with BSD", but they really are quite distinct at this point.
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(page generated 2022-04-17 23:01 UTC)