FreeBSD problems and preliminary ways to solve

[selven]

Hi Brandon!

>
> FreeBSD is well documented for an open source project. In particular,
> the Handbook serves as an excellent guide and reference for FreeBSD
> from an end-user's perspective. But is the documentation for
> developers as well-structured?
>

that's another interesting question I have been asking myself for some years
now. I've always tried finding a good book about FreeBSD's internal online
(something updated), I never really bumped into any updated ones [4.x
something maybe?], most books out there were mainly for sysadmins and for
the developers' guide .. nada. (atleast for me, am not a really good
developper who could just keep tons in the head, if i need something to
change i'll just find /usr/local/src|xargs grep 'whatineed' and from there
figure what to change and do it pretty much with trial and error).

I believe a really good source and api documentation project would help a
lot :p (user level/admin docs are already perfect for FreeBSD). but with the
amount of people we can have for that a complete source documentation can
definitely do a lot of good and no harm. Someone just needs to break every
section up and assign a piece /section to be documented.

A bit like this book :
http://blog.rlove.org/2010/07/linux-kernel-development-third-edition.html
[reading
that just made me confident enough to know which is which and what does what
internally in linux and even a layman like me was able to know what to
modify where].

We lack such good development guides for FreeBSD.



> Perhaps the FreeBSD current developer community (see: decades of
> experience and knowledge) should focus on the creation (or revision)
> of solid, comprehensive documentation for developing software in the
> FreeBSD environment.


I believe such a project would require only that long time developpers to
break the tasks as in set what architecturally stands where, and assigns the
'read the code and figure it out what each piece does' to other people, e.g
people who can understand codes but doesn't have much of a clue of the
internal api and way of doing things. ( I'll take myself for example while i
do code, i can read code, but unless something is assigned, i don't really
know what to do and ends up doing other things. /*some people are lazy,
unless given something to do*/)


>
> Imagine a horde of new college graduates, with FreeBSD under their
> belts (instead of some Linux distribution), ready to deploy it as soon
> as they have the chance in their new roles as system administrators
> and engineers -- sounds great to me.
>
> More bodies, more eyes, more minds -- this brings along with it more
> energy. We should focus on making FreeBSD the most developer-friendly
> OS out there.
>
> Nice post Brandon. Explained the problem i had since some years and i
wanted to mention that also.


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