I hate to bitch but bitch I must

[PJ]

Why is it that the manual pages, as thorough as they may be, are very,
very confusing.
Perhaps I am being too wary, but I find that too many 
instructions/examples are stumbling blocks to appreciation of the whole
system:
for instance, let's look at the instructions for changing disk labels
with glabel or is it tunefs ?
man glabel(8):

for UFS the file system label is set with
tunefs(8)
<http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=tunefs&sektion=8&apropos=0&manpath=FreeBSD+7.2-RELEASE>.
what happened to glabel?
man tunefs(8)
The *tunefs* utility cannot be
run on an active file system. To change an active file system, it must
be downgraded to read-only or unmounted.

So, you have to run tunefs from an active file system to modify another
disk?
but from man tunefs:
BUGS
This utility should work on active file systems.
What in hades does this mean--just above it says cannot be run on active
file systems. ???
 To change the root file
system, the system must be rebooted after the file system is tuned.

You can tune a file system, but you cannot tune a fish.
How cute... And fish eat bugs.

Seriously, now to the manual:
To create a permanent label for a UFS2 file system without destroying
any data, issue the following command:
# tunefs -L /home/ /dev/da3

Oh? home is what? What does this have to do with the partitions?
Here's from man glabel(8):

EXAMPLES
The following example shows how to set up a label for disk ``da2'', cre-
ate a file system on it, and mount it:
glabel label -v usr /dev/da2
newfs /dev/label/usr
mount /dev/label/usr /usr
[...]
umount /usr
glabel stop usr
glabel unload

The next example shows how to set up a label for a UFS file system:
tunefs -L data /dev/da4s1a
mount /dev/ufs/data /mnt/data

Am I to understand that glabel is only for a new system? What's with the
newfs... I'm trying to set labels on an system that is already set up.
And, the glabel examle above is not for UFS file systems? Oh, that's for
tunefs?
So why are we even dealing with this glabel?

from manual:
# tunefs -L /home/ //dev/da3/
A label should now exist in /dev/ufs which may be added to /etc/fstab:
/dev/ufs/home /home ufs rw 2 2

Why? Is this necessary? and somewhere I saw "tunefs -L volume
/dev/da0s1a" or something like that. Does that mean that each partition
should be tunefsd? Maybe the guys who programmed this stuff understand;
I sure don't. I just want to be able to set the labels according to what
they say can be done... so shy not have a clear and concise explanation?

Do people who write this stuff ever read it? Tell me that its clear and
simple and to the point... so far, I have been running back and forth
between half a dozen web pages trying to understand what is going on... 
and doing things through a dense fog does not produce creative results!