Date: Sat, 9 May 1998 14:43:22 +0930 From: Greg Lehey <grog@lemis.com> To: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@time.cdrom.com> Cc: Adrian Filipi-Martin <adrian@virginia.edu>, "Jason C. Wells" <jcwells@u.washington.edu>, advocacy@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: O'Reilly prints FreeBSD book (WAS: Re: Oracle 7 on FreeBSD) Message-ID: <19980509144322.S12200@freebie.lemis.com> In-Reply-To: <17327.894689839@time.cdrom.com>; from Jordan K. Hubbard on Fri, May 08, 1998 at 09:57:19PM -0700 References: <19980509113722.Z12200@freebie.lemis.com> <17327.894689839@time.cdrom.com>
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On Fri, 8 May 1998 at 21:57:19 -0700, Jordan K. Hubbard wrote:
>> Do they? This is the first complaint I've heard. But maybe they'll
>> let you into to storeroom to tear them out.
>
> Well, I don't want to air too much of our dirty laundry in the
> -advocacy list,
Good idea, but I suppose we should finish off this discussion.
> but let's just say that when Jack, our dear departed V.P. of
> marketing, first got it in his head to add all those man pages to
> the first edition (and, as the story goes, without even informing
> yourself first) it was not greeted by general applause and cries of
> "man pages! bring us more printed man pages!" by the audience.
Well, to be fair to Jack, he *did* inform me first. I suppose it was
really my idea. Here's a bit of the background, most of which you
know, but which others may not.
In October 1995, Jack Velte, Greg Long and a few other people from WC
were doing the Frankfurt Book Fair and came to visit me--I lived about
50 miles from Frankfurt at the time. Jack was bemoaning the fact that
FreeBSD wasn't selling because they didn't have a good book on
installing it. It didn't have to be much--50 pages or so, he said. I
had just submitted the final draft of "Porting UNIX Software"
(O'Reilly), and so I was pretty much in training, so I said, "sure,
I'll write your 50 pages for you". Went downstairs, and before they
left that evening they had a draft of 12 pages or so to think about.
Well, they liked it, but the way things go, people, particulary Jack,
kept changing their minds, so the book was a race to get something
finished before Jack changed his mind about what something was. What
finally appeared was "Installing and Running FreeBSD", which I
submitted in February 1996--about 330 pages, including 50 pages of
essential man pages needed to help you if the system wouldn't come up.
It had barely started shipping, in March 1996, when Jack called me.
The discussion went something like this:
J: Greg, that book of yours, it's not thick enough, we need something
at least as big as all those Linux books out there.
G: How big's that?
J: Oh, I don't know, about 1500 pages.
G: And when do you want it by?
J: Man, we're in a hurry. Can you do it by next month?
G: No.
J: Why not?
At this point he had also been intending to publish *all* the FreeBSD
man pages (about 5000 odd pages, in case you're interested). After a
while, I suggested that if he wanted bulk, the obvious choice would be
to include more man pages into the book. We finally agreed on the
number of pages, and I added some corrections and additions to the
book, and also had to accept this damned silly narrow page format
which nearly drove me crazy, and submitted the book for publication in
early May. For some reason, nothing happened, and I resubmitted in
August, when it did get published.
> I also don't take all the Walnut Creek tech support calls personally
> (in fact, I take them only when I absolutely can't avoid it :), but
> it's been my general impression from talking to those who do that
> customer sentiment leans less toward seeing printed man pages and more
> toward seeing the same space occupied by tutorials on setting up
> utilities like apache and natd or setting up mailing lists and playing
> with virtual mailertables in sendmail.
No doubt. There's not much point in having man pages for stuff that
isn't covered in the text. Surprisingly, there's very little in the
man pages which doens't have at least on reference from the text.
Anyway, the man pages will go away for the O'Reilly version, and I've
accepted it in much the same spirit as I accepted their arrival.
Greg
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