HAL must die!

[Da Rock]

On 03/19/11 17:18, Polytropon wrote:
> On Fri, 18 Mar 2011 22:36:41 +0100, Michel Talon<talon at lpthe.jussieu.fr>  wrote:
>    
>> How many new features of FreeBSD are
>> correctly documented presently?
>>      
> Features of the FreeBSD OS are typically well documented.
> This high quality affects all kind of documentation, be
> it the handbook&  FAQ, as well as the manpages that are
> available for system binaries, kernel interfaces, library
> calls, configuration files and system operations. Also
> see the high quality of the source code which is, due
> to its style and content (and its comment) also a source
> of documentation, mainly designed for programmers instead
> of end users.
>
> HAL, on the other hand, is obsolete as well as not part
> of the FreeBSD operating system. It's a separate port.
> Many ports do follow the quality approach for documentation,
> see "man xmms", "man mplayer" or even "man opera" for
> examples. Many "modern" software does not provide documentation
> in the standard way, try "man firefox" or any KDE program.
> In some cases, documentation is left to the users and
> scattered across the Internet in web pages and Wikis.
>
>    
Thats what I love about FBSD- the documentation is better than any other 
system out there, in the handbook but the man pages are the most 
comprehensive.

Its these ports where there is little to no documentation at all thats 
the problem. One thing I'd like to do is thank the port maintainers- 
even when the app itself may have no man page, some maintainers have 
taken the care to document a man page (or at least a doc under share/) 
themselves where they can. Very thoughtful!

A point to make regards HAL is there is next to nix in complete and/or 
understandable documentation anywhere for it. Obsolete or not, that is a 
bad case...