Linux docs (was:Re: [tlug] Re: IPv6)

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com>]

Scott Robbins writes:

 > Seriously, I think Stephen got lucky in my choice of examples.  (I have
 > to send a note to Dru Lavigne, who uses that example in her classes.)

Well, if you've ever tried to figure out what the Mac OS X libc (aka
FreeBSD's libc) is trying to do, you'll know that the glibc Info
manual is an invaluable resource. ;-)  I think by and large the BSD
kernel functions (including ifconfig, which is more related to which
kernel you have than to which libc you have) are definitely better
documented than Linux's (although I'm more familiar with NetBSD than
FreeBSD).  But they've been at it for longer, and they have a much
smaller, more coherent code base with fewer features to deal with.

 > always in the usual places.  Other things, especially Gnome related,

Don't hold me responsible for GNOME.  I hate GNOME, I think it sucks
in all ways.  In any case, since there's no FreeBSDish replacement for
GNOME per se, it's not really fair to bring it up in a comparison
between Linux and BSD practices.

 > a friend of mine says, have sparse docs for the user, good docs for the
 > developers, and nothing in between.

I don't see that GNOME docs are good for developers, personally.
They're mostly just automatically reformatted header files.  "Use the
Source, Luke" with gewgaws on.

 > This holds for Gnome stuff on
 > FreeBSD as well. For example, I see nothing in the avahi-daemon man page
 > to tell me *why* it is required for OpenOffice.  It's supposed to have
 > something to do with zeroconf and DNS.  So why is it required (in the
 > FreeBSD port) for Gimp and OO?   

Oh, that's easy to explain.  "He whose program pulls in the most
gratuitous dependencies wins" is the way they score at GNOME.  It's
worse than Emacs LISP, I swear it is.

 > Now, having ConsoleKit be linked to so many other things annoys me, but
 > again, going back to my earlier post, in FreeBSD, there are various
 > services that can be turned on and off, either in /boot/loader.conf or
 > /etc/rc.conf.  Each one has a man page that gives a pretty good idea of
 > why you should or shouldn't have it.  I wish that Fedora had that, and
 > feel that its lack is a Bad Thing(TM). 

It's a bad thing in servers, for sure.  But what you'll discover is
that the FreeBSD guys don't document the plethora of user "services"
provided by GNUMB and KiDdiE any more than the Linux guys do; they
just port the code.  Cf. http://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html.