portupgrade -> portmaster Rosetta Stone?

Royce Williams royce.williams at gmail.com
Sun Feb 26 23:51:57 UTC 2012


On Sun, Feb 26, 2012 at 2:40 PM, Doug Barton <dougb at freebsd.org> wrote:
> On 02/25/2012 16:33, Royce Williams wrote:
>> I really did mean that I was looking for a Rosetta Stone
>
> Yes, I know what a Rosetta Stone is, so I understood what you were
> asking for.

Apologies - I didn't mean to imply otherwise!

> But there are (at least) 3 problems with that approach:
>
> 1. I never used portupgrade, so I couldn't answer those questions anyway.

Understood.  For me, I will have to answer them, and I'd like to
"cache" the results so that others can follow.  Perhaps it will make
migration easier for others like myself.

> 2. By trying to "cheat" the learning process you miss out on the ability
> to challenge your own thinking about why and how you do things. And finally,

My intent wasn't so much to cheat as to supplement.  After ingesting
the entire man page, I suspect that I'll need a quick reference for
some time.

> 3. They are different tools, with different approaches, and not
> everything you did with portupgrade can (or often should) translate
> directly to something you can or should do with portmaster.

Populating that field in the Rosetta Stone table with "n/a", or a
short explanation of the can/should info should help people quickly
track down those gaps and gotchas.  In fact, that's where the value of
such a reference could really shine, IMO.

> Don't bother with the output of --help now, it is there only for a quick
> reference once you've learned something about how the program works.
> There is no substitute for *actually reading the man page.*

Understood, and agreed wholeheartedly.

> If, instead of trying to find ways not to read it, you had spent the 10
> or 20 minutes it should take you to *actually* read it, you'd be well on
> you way by now. :)

Just trying to leverage my work so that others can benefit.  I hope to
find a balance somewhere between a non-man-page-readin' crutch and a
useful cross-reference ... hopefully more toward the latter.

Maybe it's best if I just pipe down now and actually start, and
solicit feedback once there's something to feed back about.  Perhaps,
once I start, I'll find that there's not a lot of value in it.  But
for those of us not fluent in both, there's only one way to find out!
:-)

Royce


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