Date: Mon, 27 Nov 1995 09:51:24 -0800 From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@time.cdrom.com> To: grog@lemis.de (Greg Lehey) Cc: terry@lambert.org (Terry Lambert), hackers@freebsd.org (FreeBSD Hackers) Subject: Re: Where is the documentation for ibcs2? Message-ID: <2308.817494684@time.cdrom.com> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Mon, 27 Nov 1995 09:55:23 %2B0100." <199511270855.JAA04164@allegro.lemis.de>
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> > BSDI needs one because they have to enable it explicitly. > > Wrong. That's the case for FreeBSD, as you say: [jkh very unwisely jumps in] Aren't you guys having, like, multiple arguments here? I think we can simplify this considerably. For one, any command that appears in /usr/bin should have a man page. It's not just a good idea, it's the law. So there's no point at all in debating that. Just make it a very *small* man page if you have to. :) Second, BSDI's iBCS2 emulator does a lot more than ours does. For one thing, their "ibcs2" command chroots someplace and does lots of things to pre-load the process's view of the world so that all the weird path assumptions it might have hardcoded into it will still work. Our (undocumented) hackery in /dev is not much to compare to that, even if it doesn't meet everyone's standards for purity of implementation. So that's an apples-and-oranges argument and of little value in debating also. Finally, if this is confusing you, you should probably doc it on the grounds that it may confuse someone else. However, you might also count the words you had to type in having this silly argument and wonder what kind of "emulation guide" you could have written with the same characters. :-) And to Terry, I don't think it's an unreasonable point to make that our current ibcs2/linux setup documentation sucks. It does, believe me. Why not read all the verbiage I had to stick into the doom/executor READMEs in the commerce distribution if you don't believe me? I don't go to the effort to doc something (a process I hate) unless I've been seriously hassled about it in questions. There are kernel options that need to be reenabled, the module loaded (also note that there may be an ibcs2=FOO line in sysconfig, but none for Linux). It's not immediately obvious, and immediately obvious is what it should be. This can be solved through a little more engineering and probably a lot more documentation. Jordan
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