From owner-freebsd-stable Wed Apr 5 2:40:50 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org Received: from yellow.rahul.net (yellow.rahul.net [192.160.13.18]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id BB15037BDBD for ; Wed, 5 Apr 2000 02:40:37 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from dhesi@rahul.net) Received: by yellow.rahul.net (Postfix, from userid 104) id A25AC7C2B; Wed, 5 Apr 2000 02:40:36 -0700 (PDT) To: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org Subject: Re: FreeBSD/Opensource is not free Newsgroups: a2i.lists.freebsd-stable References: X-Newsreader: NN version 6.5.6 (NOV) Message-Id: <20000405094036.A25AC7C2B@yellow.rahul.net> Date: Wed, 5 Apr 2000 02:40:36 -0700 (PDT) From: dhesi@rahul.net (Rahul Dhesi) Sender: owner-freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG I have wanted to contribute documentation, but found no good way to do it. To write documentation, I need authoritative information. That is hard to get. If ther were design documents and programmer's notes, I could take them and convert them into user manuals quite easily. But there are no such documents that I have found so far. To write good documentation I would have to essentially read all the FreeBSD code and reverse-engineer it, following what is being done line by line and variable by variable. That would take a LOT of time. The other alternative I have would be to simply experiment, find out what works, and write it down. That too takes a lot of time, and the information you end up getting is incomplete. I could also follow the FreeBSD-related mailing lists but the information there is very fragment and it's hard to distinguish the authoritative information from the rumors and guesses. -- Rahul Dhesi (spam-filtered with RSS and ORBS) See my ORBS faq: http://www.rahul.net/dhesi/orbs.faq.txt To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-stable" in the body of the message