Items missing from the handbook and/or FAQs.

Chuck Swiger cswiger at mac.com
Mon Apr 26 10:27:21 PDT 2004


Joe Rhett wrote:
>>Well I think, and I'm sure I'm not alone in this case, an installation
>>documentation must be read/printed before installation.
>>Another thing, sysinstall comes with an help, and you can read it from
>>sysinstall.  For example I let you read /stand/help/partition.hlp 
>  
> If there was a way to read this during the installation, I couldn't
> figure it out.  Maybe I'm dumb, but...

Your expectations are unreasonable, here.  FreeBSD can be installed off of two 
floppy disks; complete FreeBSD documentation available over the web in HTML or 
in PDF is much larger than that and doesn't fit!

>>>Now how about the real question I raised, which is integrated
>>>documentation?  An option to see a list of disk types...?
>>
>>By default you are given the FreeBSD type, well FreeBSD installation
>>system aims the installation of FreeBSD, I mean people hardly need to
>>create DOS, or other filesystem slices during FreeBSD installation.
> 
> On a laptop it would be nice to create the suspend partition...

Why not use the vendor-supplied utility to create one, and then install 
FreeBSD into the remaining space?

>>>man faith returns information on what it is, with nothing at all about
>>>how to enable or disable it.
>>
>>Well, let's stop this talk...
>>Anyway I'm waiting for your doc PRs, you could even add a Cc to me. 
>  
> Just out of curiosity, why would it make sense for me to submit PRs? 

An honest answer would be that your current approach is unlikely to convince 
other people to spend the time to make these changes for you.  It's also the 
case that other people make the changes they feel are best, which may not be 
the same changes you would make.

> 1. I don't know enough about the submission guidelines and style issues
> to submit relevant work.  Yes, they are posted.  And yet I know enough
> from working on other open source projects that submissions will be
> tightly controlled by people with unwritten desires.  So it'll take me a
> few back and forths to make submissions that will be accepted, and...

It's not that difficult to learn how to make a useful submission, but it's up 
to you whether you want to spend the time.  I suppose another approach would 
be to pay someone to implement your ideas.

> Frankly, this sort of "we'll ignore your complaints but accept your
> patches" approach is generally just a way to ignore problems.  I've dealt
> with it too many times before to not recognize it.

We haven't been ignoring your complaints, but have it as you will.

-- 
-Chuck



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