FreeBSD for the common man(or woman) (was: > upgrade 7.2

[Jerry McAllister]

On Sun, Aug 09, 2009 at 07:52:31AM -0600, Chad Perrin wrote:

> On Sat, Aug 08, 2009 at 07:55:18PM +0200, Polytropon wrote:
> > On Sat, 8 Aug 2009 10:46:00 -0600, Chad Perrin <perrin at apotheon.com> wrote:
> > > Yeah, I hate that stuff.  The GNU project is kind of like the Microsoft
> > > of the open source community, that way.
> > 
> > Be happy that there at least is an info manual. In many cases, there
> > is NO local documentation, neither in man or info format. The usual
> > cases of documentation, often found in different Linusi, but as well
> > in some "modern software" on FreeBSD, are:
> > 	- bury the documentation in an arbitrary web location
> > 	- use a Wiki for documentation
> > 	- let the users write the documentation
> > 	- don't document anything.
> 
> An info page is almost as bad as nothing, as far as I'm concerned.  The
> GNU project has this bizarre idea that everybody in the world should use
> everything it produces and *nothing else*, no matter how painful it all
> is to use -- and assumes everybody should be using emacs, so obviously
> the baroque emacs-inspired interface to info pages is "ideal".
> 
> Debian actually tended to be pretty good at manpage coverage of software
> and files on the system, but FreeBSD still manages to do at least
> slightly better most of the time -- and, for some reason, few of the
> other Linux distributions took advantage of the manpages produced by the
> Debian project.

The thing I notice is that the FreeBSD man pages are most often relevant
for Linux too with only occasional exceptions for less common arguments
and features.   So, you run whatever Lunix and keep a FreeBSD handy for
the documentation.    Of course, that begs the question of why even have
the Linux at all then, but that isn't the topic of the post.

////jerry