release documentation confusing for 9.1

[Kevin Oberman]

On Tue, Jul 31, 2012 at 5:52 PM, Aristedes Maniatis <ari at ish.com.au> wrote:
> Could I ask that someone with appropriate access rights review the state of
> release documentation for 9.1 beta. It is very confused.
>
>
> 1. This page is the best information available:
> http://www.freebsd.org/releases/9.1R/schedule.html
>
> 2. The link from the front page ( http://www.freebsd.org/ ) is labelled
> "Upcoming: 9.1-BETA1" but goes to a page which is mostly about existing
> releases, not the next release. http://www.freebsd.org/where.html#helptest
>
> 3. Clicking on the "view" link for the 9.1 information on that page takes
> you to http://wiki.freebsd.org/Releng/9.1TODO which looks a lot like the
> information in point [1] but wrong/old.
>
> 4. On http://www.freebsd.org/where.html#helptest there is a link to "FreeBSD
> Snapshot Releases" for people interested in "FreeBSD-CURRENT (AKA
> 10.0-CURRENT)". But following the link takes you to a page where you get
> linked to "9-CURRENT, 8-STABLE, 7-STABLE, and 6-STABLE" snapshots.
>
>
>
> It is possible I'm just stuck in the past, but I've never been able to
> navigate the 'new' bowling ball branded FreeBSD site nearly as well as the
> older incarnation. And yes, I can eventually figure it all out... but this
> information could be a whole lot clearer. I design information presentation
> for a living, so perhaps I'm picky about these things, but I do think that
> confusion could turn people away from my favourite operating system.
>
> I'm happy to help if someone wants to enlist my assistance, but I don't
> currently have any commit rights on this project.

RE has not done very well in updating this stuff for several releases.
RE is a very hard job and I understand that they are busy with both
9.1 and $REAL_JOB. I'd love for them to find someone whom they trust
and with reasonable clue to whom they could give the right to update
all of this stuff. It would still lag a bit, but it would be closer.

As far as what will be in 9.1, the doc tree was tagged for 9.1 two
days ago and can be downloaded from svn or cvs and built. Note that
it's all in sgml and you need to build the various formats. I'm not
sure when they will hit the web site and, of course, noting is
official until the release, but it is unlikely to change at this point
except for minor corrections.
-- 
R. Kevin Oberman, Network Engineer
E-mail: kob6558 at gmail.com