Merging the FAQ -> handbook, build time options, proof ofconcept patch

[Mark Linimon]

On Sat, 4 Dec 2004, Chuck Swiger wrote:

> If you can't answer a frequent question with a paragraph or so, I would be 
> happy if the FAQ gave a brief intro and a link to a more comprehensive 
> description elsewhere.  Whether elsewhere is in the handbook, some other 
> article, or elsewhere on the web shouldn't matter.

That's a good point.

> Heh.  My take on this is that whenever someone answers a question on a
> mailing list with "This is a FAQ", such material actually ought to be
> in the FAQ.

Another good point, but possibly >1 FAQ.  e.g. one for the 'what is
FreeBSD' stuff, another for 'WARNING - WRITE_DMA'.  The former would
hold really general things that rarely change.  The latter would hold
stuff that always changes.

> In particular, searching the FAQ either via the find mechanism in one's 
> browser or via http://www.freebsd.org/search/search.html about an error like 
> "ad0: WARNING - WRITE_DMA interrupt was seen but timeout fired LBA=2928095" 
> produces nothing.
> 
> Another example would be searching for "why does ruby dump core when I run 
> portupgrade?"...

More good points.  A related one is that our mailing list search feature
doesn't really apply itself well to these kinds of things -- you will
get a match on 20 different people asking the question, and perhaps 1 or
2 where the question is answered.  This is, of course, a more general
problem of searching -- you can become equally frustrated by doing a
Google search.

Arguments in favor of moving those kinds of questions into some other
venue than the existing FAQ is that 1) it wouldn't necessarily have to
be in DocBook, so the barrier to creating new entries would be lower,
meaning that 2) we'd have a lot more developers contributing stuff to it.

mcl