From owner-freebsd-current@FreeBSD.ORG Mon Oct 20 23:15:30 2014 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-current@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.freebsd.org (mx1.freebsd.org [8.8.178.115]) (using TLSv1.2 with cipher AECDH-AES256-SHA (256/256 bits)) (No client certificate requested) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTPS id 513FE173; Mon, 20 Oct 2014 23:15:30 +0000 (UTC) Received: from phlegethon.blisses.org (phlegethon.blisses.org [50.56.97.101]) (using TLSv1.2 with cipher ECDHE-RSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384 (256/256 bits)) (Client did not present a certificate) by mx1.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTPS id 15A1BA60; Mon, 20 Oct 2014 23:15:29 +0000 (UTC) Received: from blisses.org (cocytus.blisses.org [23.25.209.73]) by phlegethon.blisses.org (Postfix) with ESMTPSA id 850391F13D8; Mon, 20 Oct 2014 19:15:28 -0400 (EDT) Date: Mon, 20 Oct 2014 19:15:26 -0400 From: Mason Loring Bliss To: Allan Jude Subject: Re: HOWTO articles for migrating from Linux to FreeBSD, especially for pkg? Message-ID: <20141020231526.GO6490@blisses.org> References: <20140811221043.492110d4@arch> <20140813213718.4814f58c@arch> <53EC1214.9020505@pinyon.org> <20141018121150.5aae6682@X220.alogt.com> <20141018145857.c17931841923f39c79464033@dec.sakura.ne.jp> <20141020183253.GE6490@blisses.org> <5837e41bf824926f9c49325e1817aec8@ultimatedns.net> <54458B06.5050301@freebsd.org> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: <54458B06.5050301@freebsd.org> User-Agent: Mutt/1.5.23 (2014-03-12) Cc: freebsd-current@freebsd.org X-BeenThere: freebsd-current@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.18-1 Precedence: list List-Id: Discussions about the use of FreeBSD-current List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Mon, 20 Oct 2014 23:15:30 -0000 On Mon, Oct 20, 2014 at 06:21:58PM -0400, Allan Jude wrote: > This thread is supposed to be about how to make it easier for people to > migrate to FreeBSD from Linux. Not a discussion about forums vs mailing > lists vs newsgroups. I'm going to transition from being an avid Debian user who hates web fora to an avid FreeBSD who hates web fora. Anyway, my experience here is useful as I've got to be representative of a number of people making the transition lately. It's been a relatively smooth transition so far, with only a couple bugs and quirks in the way of my doing everything I did with Debian. Two things would be principally useful for people coming from Linux. First, the handbook should be updated and corrected, as it's a good enough resource that I've come to depend upon it, but I've hit snags that seem to not reflect the current state of FreeBSD. For instance, the page that talks about running buildworld and buildkernel have some instructions that are evidently vestigal for root-on-ZFS people. Another example, the documentation of Poudriere is hard to follow, presenting a complex and idealized set-up rather than explaining to a new user what the moving parts are and how it all works. I strongly suspect in that case that people who need the Handbook won't easily follow that, and people who can follow it don't need the Handbook per se, or that level of instruction. Joe Armstrong talks about this process of picking an audience in his forward to the second edition of his Erlang book: https://joearms.github.io/2014/06/26/Background-to-programming-erlang.html The second thing that would be useful would be a series of cheat sheets for various things. This can either be equivalent commands or equivalent systems. Let new folks know that LUKS is GELI and that md-raid1 is gmirror and so forth. Show common package handling commands for various Linux flavours and map them to pkgng and ports. For instance, what's the equivalent of "yum provides"? Or what do I do in place of "apt-cache search" or "zypper up" or similar. Other things in the grab bag... It's generally said that ports and pkgs shouldn't mix, but there are at least a couple instances where it's unavoidable: I bet roughly no one who installs Subversion wants the FreeBSD bug report headers baked in by default, but there they are unless you rebuild from ports with a non-default configuration. If you want to watch DVDs on your FreeBSD workstation, it's necessary to install libdvdcss, but you can't get it from pkgng because it's not there. Again, you must build from ports. I have nothing against ports, but people are warned off of mixing packages and ports when clearly it's necessary sometimes. Oh, here's one. I *was* horrified by ports at first, until someone told me about "make config-recursive". It really makes me wonder why this isn't the default. I remember giving up on FreeBSD when 9.x was new because I had to build X from ports after the FreeBSD breach, and it seemed like the process was going to take a couple days of stuttering stops and starts as random packages I didn't want in some cases popped up between compiles. I learned some mechanism for saying "just take the defaults" but what I know now is that what I really wanted was "make config-recursive". Why, out of curiosity, is it not the default? That would seem better than documenting it harder. Ah, and one more for the grab bag. I strongly suspect that many folks coming from Linux are going to bristle at the notion of using Sendmail. I used to run it so I wasn't terribly bothered by it, but maybe pre-populating rc.conf with obvious bits that people can see and turn off would be nice. OpenBSD has a nice model of populating rc.conf and sysctl.conf fully, and it ends up being a pleasant tool. Those awash in wonder, coming from Linux, can say, "Look, it's all right here!" -- Mason Loring Bliss mason@blisses.org Ewige Blumenkraft! (if awake 'sleep (aref #(sleep dream) (random 2))) -- Hamlet, Act III, Scene I