From owner-freebsd-advocacy Fri May 8 22:14:07 1998 Return-Path: Received: (from majordom@localhost) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.8/8.8.8) id WAA24354 for freebsd-advocacy-outgoing; Fri, 8 May 1998 22:14:07 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from owner-freebsd-advocacy@FreeBSD.ORG) Received: from freebie.lemis.com (freebie.lemis.com [139.130.136.133]) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id WAA24255 for ; Fri, 8 May 1998 22:13:40 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from grog@lemis.com) Received: (from grog@localhost) by freebie.lemis.com (8.8.8/8.8.7) id OAA25857; Sat, 9 May 1998 14:43:22 +0930 (CST) (envelope-from grog) Message-ID: <19980509144322.S12200@freebie.lemis.com> Date: Sat, 9 May 1998 14:43:22 +0930 From: Greg Lehey To: "Jordan K. Hubbard" Cc: Adrian Filipi-Martin , "Jason C. Wells" , advocacy@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: O'Reilly prints FreeBSD book (WAS: Re: Oracle 7 on FreeBSD) References: <19980509113722.Z12200@freebie.lemis.com> <17327.894689839@time.cdrom.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii X-Mailer: Mutt 0.91.1i In-Reply-To: <17327.894689839@time.cdrom.com>; from Jordan K. Hubbard on Fri, May 08, 1998 at 09:57:19PM -0700 WWW-Home-Page: http://www.lemis.com/~grog Organization: LEMIS, PO Box 460, Echunga SA 5153, Australia Phone: +61-8-8388-8286 Fax: +61-8-8388-8725 Mobile: +61-41-739-7062 Sender: owner-freebsd-advocacy@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG On Fri, 8 May 1998 at 21:57:19 -0700, Jordan K. Hubbard wrote: >> Do they? This is the first complaint I've heard. But maybe they'll >> let you into to storeroom to tear them out. > > Well, I don't want to air too much of our dirty laundry in the > -advocacy list, Good idea, but I suppose we should finish off this discussion. > but let's just say that when Jack, our dear departed V.P. of > marketing, first got it in his head to add all those man pages to > the first edition (and, as the story goes, without even informing > yourself first) it was not greeted by general applause and cries of > "man pages! bring us more printed man pages!" by the audience. Well, to be fair to Jack, he *did* inform me first. I suppose it was really my idea. Here's a bit of the background, most of which you know, but which others may not. In October 1995, Jack Velte, Greg Long and a few other people from WC were doing the Frankfurt Book Fair and came to visit me--I lived about 50 miles from Frankfurt at the time. Jack was bemoaning the fact that FreeBSD wasn't selling because they didn't have a good book on installing it. It didn't have to be much--50 pages or so, he said. I had just submitted the final draft of "Porting UNIX Software" (O'Reilly), and so I was pretty much in training, so I said, "sure, I'll write your 50 pages for you". Went downstairs, and before they left that evening they had a draft of 12 pages or so to think about. Well, they liked it, but the way things go, people, particulary Jack, kept changing their minds, so the book was a race to get something finished before Jack changed his mind about what something was. What finally appeared was "Installing and Running FreeBSD", which I submitted in February 1996--about 330 pages, including 50 pages of essential man pages needed to help you if the system wouldn't come up. It had barely started shipping, in March 1996, when Jack called me. The discussion went something like this: J: Greg, that book of yours, it's not thick enough, we need something at least as big as all those Linux books out there. G: How big's that? J: Oh, I don't know, about 1500 pages. G: And when do you want it by? J: Man, we're in a hurry. Can you do it by next month? G: No. J: Why not? At this point he had also been intending to publish *all* the FreeBSD man pages (about 5000 odd pages, in case you're interested). After a while, I suggested that if he wanted bulk, the obvious choice would be to include more man pages into the book. We finally agreed on the number of pages, and I added some corrections and additions to the book, and also had to accept this damned silly narrow page format which nearly drove me crazy, and submitted the book for publication in early May. For some reason, nothing happened, and I resubmitted in August, when it did get published. > I also don't take all the Walnut Creek tech support calls personally > (in fact, I take them only when I absolutely can't avoid it :), but > it's been my general impression from talking to those who do that > customer sentiment leans less toward seeing printed man pages and more > toward seeing the same space occupied by tutorials on setting up > utilities like apache and natd or setting up mailing lists and playing > with virtual mailertables in sendmail. No doubt. There's not much point in having man pages for stuff that isn't covered in the text. Surprisingly, there's very little in the man pages which doens't have at least on reference from the text. Anyway, the man pages will go away for the O'Reilly version, and I've accepted it in much the same spirit as I accepted their arrival. Greg -- See complete headers for address and phone numbers finger grog@lemis.com for PGP public key To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-advocacy" in the body of the message