Date: Wed, 29 Jan 97 19:56:55 CST From: Joe Greco <jgreco@solaria.sol.net> To: msmith@atrad.adelaide.edu.au (Michael Smith) Cc: mcgovern@spoon.beta.com, hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Constructive criticism (was: bashing everyone for fun and profit) Message-ID: <199701300156.TAA29530@solaria.sol.net> In-Reply-To: <199701300120.LAA24028@genesis.atrad.adelaide.edu.au> from "Michael Smith" at Jan 30, 97 11:50:10 am
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> This is called the "learning curve". There are two ways to climb it, for > climb it you must if you want to do anything. > > 1) Spend lots of time trying, asking questions, exercising your intelligence > and patience. > 2) Give lots of money to someone else to have them force you through 1). 3) Spend lots of time trying and bludgeon your way mostly through it, then read the documentation (even if its out of date), and it will probably make a lot more sense. > It's in the handbook, in the section on ports. It looks like a cookbook > to me. Or perhaps you could look at a few other ones that might be > similar to yours - learn by example? That worked for me... I wanted a port for "tripwire" and I bludgeoned my way through, just fine. Mind you, I don't necessarily consider it unreasonable to climb a 150' "learning curve" by wearing my magnetic boots... I spent the better part of a day building a minimal FreeBSD floppy that could NFS mount /usr/X11R6 off of a read only NFS server and act as a diskless Xterminal. That was fun :-) > I hate to say it, but I think that the right line for you is "there > are a lot of us out here that like to whine about doing stuff because > it requires some effort, and we're socialised to expect everything > handed to us on a platter covered with disclaimers". Hmmm, I don't know if that's fair... but then again, maybe it is. ... Joe ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Joe Greco - Systems Administrator jgreco@ns.sol.net Solaria Public Access UNIX - Milwaukee, WI 414/342-4847
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