Date: Fri, 20 Jul 2007 12:11:43 +0200 From: Marc Fonvieille <blackend@freebsd.org> To: Giorgos Keramidas <keramida@freebsd.org> Cc: freebsd-doc@freebsd.org, doc-committers@freebsd.org, Chin-San Huang <chinsan@freebsd.org>, cvs-doc@freebsd.org, cvs-all@freebsd.org Subject: Re: cvs commit: doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/ports/chapter.sgml Message-ID: <20070720101143.GB1002@gothic.blackend.org> In-Reply-To: <20070719125410.GA9766@kobe.laptop> References: <200707190121.l6J1LOvd007607@repoman.freebsd.org> <20070719054803.GA1002@gothic.blackend.org> <469F1D0F.2090307@FreeBSD.org> <20070719125410.GA9766@kobe.laptop>
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On Thu, Jul 19, 2007 at 03:54:10PM +0300, Giorgos Keramidas wrote: > On 2007-07-19 01:13, Doug Barton <dougb@freebsd.org> wrote: > >>> en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/ports chapter.sgml > >>> Log: > >>> - Introduce another way for upgrading packages and ports using bpkg(8). > >> > >> I'm not sure the Handbook has the vocation to talk about all > >> available tools to manage ports and packages. [...] > > > > FWIW, I (with portmaster author hat on) am sort of ambivalent about > > this issue. I've avoided adding anything to that chapter about > > portmaster because my personal feeling is that a laundry list of > > tools isn't useful to the user, especially if all the descriptions > > are the same size as the ones that are there now. > > > > What I think would be more useful (and again, I'm speaking only for > > myself) would be a list of tools available with a brief description > > of each, and links to outside sources (web pages, pkg-descr files, > > etc.) where an interested user can get more information. I do think > > that letting our users know that there are tools available is a good > > thing, I don't think mini-manuals for each tool is appropriate in > > that context. > > This sounds nice. > > It would also be nice to have articles like: > > "Managing thirdparty ports & packages with portupgrade" > "Managing thirdparty ports & packages with portmaster" > "Managing thirdparty ports & packages with XXX" > > in the doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/... collection, so the Handbook > can talk about the general, common ideas behind port management, and > the articles can turn into mini-manuals. > > It may even be possible to talk about one or two (the 'official' port > management tools), and then move the rest into separate articles. If > the tools mentioned in the articles get 'official' status or one of > the currently official tools gets dropped, or gets stale, we can move > chunks of the Handbook from articles to the book, or from the book to > standalone articles. > > Does this sound like something which makes more sense than blowing up > the size of the Handbook with full manuals about all the available > tools we have now? > That's exactly what I think. For the moment we have one "official" management tool: portupgrade, hence this one must be documented in the ports chapter. I also feel portmaster may be added in future. For the other third-party tools, they can be the subject of a specific article but adding a mini-howto section in the Handbook for each other tool is not a good thing. I just looked at http://www.bsdstats.org/freebsd/ports.php?category=ports-mgmt just to get an idea of what some (4,982) people use: bpkg 1 portmanager 210 portmaster 265 portupgrade 1836 portupgrade-devel 552 well portupgrade, beside being mentioned everywhere in UPDATING, is really used by our community. -- Marc
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