From owner-freebsd-doc Sat May 20 13:36:49 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-doc@freebsd.org Received: from po4.wam.umd.edu (po4.wam.umd.edu [128.8.10.166]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id B4EA037B6F2 for ; Sat, 20 May 2000 13:36:46 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from howardjp@wam.umd.edu) Received: from rac4.wam.umd.edu (root@rac4.wam.umd.edu [128.8.10.144]) by po4.wam.umd.edu (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id QAA18680 for ; Sat, 20 May 2000 16:36:52 -0400 (EDT) Received: from rac4.wam.umd.edu (sendmail@localhost [127.0.0.1]) by rac4.wam.umd.edu (8.9.3/8.9.3) with SMTP id QAA11603 for ; Sat, 20 May 2000 16:36:44 -0400 (EDT) Received: from rac4.wam.umd.edu (howardjp@localhost) by rac4.wam.umd.edu (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id QAA11595 for ; Sat, 20 May 2000 16:36:44 -0400 (EDT) Message-Id: <200005202036.QAA11595@rac4.wam.umd.edu> X-Authentication-Warning: rac4.wam.umd.edu: howardjp owned process doing -bs To: freebsd-doc@freebsd.org Subject: FreeBSD Manual Set Date: Sat, 20 May 2000 16:36:38 -0400 From: James Howard Sender: owner-freebsd-doc@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.org I asked about this five months ago, but I would like to take a fresh start on this. The 4.4BSD manuals are completely unavailable (Amazon and Barnes and Nobel cannot locate them). This is not all bad since they are getting more out of date every day. So how about updating them? Simply updating the manual pages should not take a lot since the manpages themselves should have been updated with each source change (in theory, they should each be checked). Sure, the online stuff is great, but when I try to scribble notes on them, I just scratch my monitor. :) However, the supplementary documents are out of date (FreeBSD does not ship Berkeley Pascal; I am not sure how relevant the 4.4BSD kernel building is; Jove is no longer shipped; Rand MH is no longer shipped), encumbered (YACC, Lex, SED, AWK, etc.). Or worse (how much has vi changed? I do not know, I am not a big vi user; What about trex? Rogue? dc and bc are out of date and encumbered!). So there are three different route that can be taken on this front: (1) Drop the supplementary documents, (2) Update the supplementary documents to be current, or (3) Start again from scratch. While each has a number of advantages, a combination of 2 and 3 would be nice. Update the vi manual and the IPC documents. Write new documents on configuring FreeBSD as a router or a webserver, stuff on the Ports tree, etc, how to make a Port, update the kernel config docs. Anything anyelse thinks might be nice should go in here. In fact, DaemonNews and the FreeBSD Ezine can be bled for articles and new articles can be "Beta Tested" there. Well, having now suggested this project, I should probably volunteer. So I will volunteer to act as a writer, an editor, or as a project leader (which probably means lots of writing and editing) if asked. All I need to know are two things: (1) Is this worth it? A good idea? And (2) What do I do next? Thank you, J~ To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-doc" in the body of the message