package management documentation

[Bill Moran]

Peter Ryan <pryan at singnet.com.sg> wrote:

> How did everyone here find out
> about the various utitilities 
> available for managing ports and
> packages ?

The handbook is the best place to start:
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/ports.html

There are also many resources such as Daemonnews and Michael Lucas'
Big Scary Daemons series that have lots of information.  A lot of it
comes from working with things over time.

Keep in mind that with open source, the docs are only as good as you
and I make them.  (ok, there's other people involved, but you get the
point)

If you go through the official FreeBSD docs and are still confused,
consider working with the doc team to make the docs better.  Sometimes,
when you understand something very well, it can be difficult to
understand why others don't understand it, so having that sort of
input can be very helpful.

Otherwise, this list is where you can go when all else fails, but don't
be upset if asking a question on the list just gets you a link to
existing docs.  It's pretty common for folks to ask questions that
are already answered in the docs, because they haven't found the docs
yet.  Thus, a link to the docs answers two questions at once: 1) the
answer to the original question, and 2) where to find the answer.

If you're not getting good responses to your questions, I would suggest
reading grog's explanation on how to ask good questions:
http://www.lemis.com/questions.html

-- 
Bill Moran
Potential Technologies
http://www.potentialtech.com