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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? 
In-reply-to: Your message of "Mon, 27 Nov 1995 09:55:23 +0100."
             <199511270855.JAA04164@allegro.lemis.de> 
Date: Mon, 27 Nov 1995 09:51:24 -0800
Message-ID: <2308.817494684@time.cdrom.com>
From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@time.cdrom.com>
Sender: owner-hackers@freebsd.org
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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