Date: Tue, 31 Jan 1995 23:05:57 -0800 (PST) From: Morgan Davis <root@io.cts.com> To: jkh@FreeBSD.org (Jordan K. Hubbard) Cc: hackers@freefall.cdrom.com Subject: Re: sup: Ok, I'm gonna do it. Message-ID: <199502010705.XAA01059@io.cts.com> In-Reply-To: <29186.791616495@time.cdrom.com> from "Jordan K. Hubbard" at Jan 31, 95 09:28:15 pm
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Jordan K. Hubbard writes: > > If you think we can keep newbies away by not documenting things then you're > living in a fool's paradise. We can't keep them away, we simply get newbies > who are more clueless than even they have to be! :-) This is a point that needs additional reinforcement. A friend of mine and I have a lot of experience working with different flavors of Unix. We also happen to be a significant players at CTSNET (a major Internet access provider in San Diego). We have been amazed at how poorly documented routine procedures for FreeBSD happen to be. We're looking at FreeBSD as a potentially serious supplement to our existing WAN/LAN structure which is currently relying on SCO Unix for much of the host, server, and administrative tasks for more than 4,000 subscribers. Using dual news servers, we pick up one of the largest newsfeeds in Southern California with more than 11,000 groups, and have an extremely active WWW server that is currently hitting about 2 million accesses per month. The collective knowlegdge and experience to keep all this going between just the two of us is about 25 years. That picture painted, getting things to happen with FreeBSD has been less than smooth, mainly because there is a lot of exploration involved just to find the answers. (In a previous message, I liked FreeBSD to an adventure game). My friend, fortunately, has had the advantage of asking me how to accomplish basic things like getting sup working, only because I've already done a lot of the footwork before him. I think the attribution of "newbie" is misleading. Sure, we may be newbies to FreeBSD, but certainly not to Unix OS's in general, and not to "good design expectations". In lieu of adminstrator's manuals that basically give an overview of what makes FreeBSD work, there should be some kind of roadmap that spells things out clearly. Here's how you get the sources so you can at least recompile your kernel. Here's how you set up sup so you can get the bug fixes to those sources you just picked up. Here's how you reconfig your kernel to turn your machine into a network router. Here's how you easily get PPP working. Here's how you... The current FreeBSD.FAQ is horrible and filled with incorrect information. This is not a roadmap. It's a hack. After I installed 2.0R in November just after it was released, I exited from the nice installer interface wondering, OK, now how do I get back to that? The installer ought to be EASILY reentrant -- I had no idea where it ran or how to get back to it once it quit. And it should also assume that the user may want to come back to it to do other things and really make a lot of noise about proceding with things like fdisk and disklabelling, post-install. It also seems to want to find its FAQ files and read me files on the boot floopy and not in /usr/share/FAQ as a secondary (or perhaps primary location). Etc. etc. Now, I realize that much is being done about the documentation. There is a web site that will tie all this together. And that's really great, and perhaps I'm digressing a bit. But the idea of not making it easy for what I would consider to be "expert" users to get FreeBSD working in the best way turns your user base into: a) a bunch of uninformed people who can't make accurate statements about FreeBSD, b) a bunch of people who think FreeBSD is a joke because you can't do anything with it, or c) something worse than those, like a bunch of people wanting to return to Linux. :-) And by "making it easy" -- I don't mean spoonfeeding, handholding, etc., which many seem to think is bad since it would mean educating those who should even own pocket calculators so that they could possibly administrate a FreeBSD system. But, heck, if you did *that*, then you've just done something pretty amazing. What's wrong with that? Give users the tools and information to reasonably educate themselves. The alternative is lack of support for FreeBSD since it embodies no real support for those interested in checking it out. You'll either wind up with total indifference to what FreeBSD is all about while people move to something else, or you'll end up with a group of frustrated people who just gave up and have nothing good to say. Sure, sharing the information may be painful at times. But, as the net continues to teach us everyday, information withheld is a more terrible consequence. The frustrating thing? I know that there is greatness here. Why hide it?
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