From owner-freebsd-newbies Wed Jul 22 16:01:43 1998 Return-Path: Received: (from majordom@localhost) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.8/8.8.8) id QAA14647 for freebsd-newbies-outgoing; Wed, 22 Jul 1998 16:01:43 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from owner-freebsd-newbies@FreeBSD.ORG) Received: from phoenix.welearn.com.au (suebla.lnk.telstra.net [139.130.44.81]) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id QAA14639 for ; Wed, 22 Jul 1998 16:01:38 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from sue@phoenix.welearn.com.au) Received: (from sue@localhost) by phoenix.welearn.com.au (8.8.5/8.8.5) id JAA02738; Thu, 23 Jul 1998 09:00:51 +1000 (EST) Message-ID: <19980723090047.45011@welearn.com.au> Date: Thu, 23 Jul 1998 09:00:47 +1000 From: Sue Blake To: Chris Coleman Cc: Tim Gerchmez , freebsd-newbies@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Upgrading and Use of this list (gentle reminder) References: <3.0.5.32.19980722130055.0081c410@mx.serv.net> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii X-Mailer: Mutt 0.88e In-Reply-To: ; from Chris Coleman on Wed, Jul 22, 1998 at 05:57:58PM -0400 Sender: owner-freebsd-newbies@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.org On Wed, Jul 22, 1998 at 05:57:58PM -0400, Chris Coleman wrote: > Have you tried a "source upgrade"? > > Basically: > > cd /usr/src > cvsup stable-supfile.cvsup > make buildworld && installworld Of course there's a bit more to it than that, but without discussing the actual technique (-questions and/or the Handbook for that) I'd like to have a bit of a newbie dummy-spit here :-) Sorry Chris, I don't mean to put down your response, but earlier this year a lot of people on -questions were stating this as *the* approach, without realising that some people (don't know they) can't follow it. A few FreeBSD users have not bothered to install the sources. Perhaps they have no room, or never imagined using them. This happens to apply to a lot of newbies because a lot of home user/learners are newbies. A few FreeBSD users don't have a good Internet connection. Perhaps they dial in from home where combined local or long distance phone charges and Internet time and/or bandwidth charges (both of which differ hugely for different contries) can get pretty costly. Around here, for example, a lot of Internet accounts charge by the minute or automatically cut you off after say 1-3 hours on line, in order to reduce overall usage. I suspect that a larger than average proportion of home newbies have limitations to their Internet access. Those more well equipped often recommend cvsup because the method is the easiest for them so it sounds good for newbies. There's nothing wrong with that; a little practice and a lot of reading and anyone can do it. What I'd like to see, though, is more appreciation for the limits that a lot of people are working within. As I mentioned on -questions, it is no longer realistic to assume that these resources are available to newbies, and it would help a great deal if recommendations were accompanied by lists of required resources. Where use of disk space or a high volume download is involved, it can be pretty important to have some idea whether it's more like 1 or 10 or 100 megabytes we're talking about. I've found it extremely difficult to find that kind of guidance. Well, they don't have to count and worry; they just do it. Aah, what luxury! :-) If you happen to have hundreds of megabytes sitting idle on your FreeBSD partition, and Internet use doesn't cost you an arm and three legs, then there's probably no reason not to install the sources and have a stab at cvsup if you want to, especially if it's only a home use machine. But I have no idea what would happen if you ran out of disk space half way through, for example. I doubt it would be much fun. If it were me, upon that kind of advice I might consider reinstalling FreeBSD from the old CD, complete with sources this time, onto a much larger partition, and getting another Internet account that had a pricing scheme more suited to large downloads. But I would know that, without being told that it was necessary. I wonder how many other newbies would have known? I believe the root cause of the problem here is that the FreeBSD community is not used to having so many home users and unix-newbies around. For years they've been working with ample hardware and enough background to work most things out for themselves, and so have the majority of FreeBSD users they've known about. Of course many FreeBSD newbies also fall into this category, but these days increasing numbers of newbies don't. Sometimes the advice we get from -questions makes accidental assumptions about our resources and it's necessary to proceed with caution, perhaps follow up with a question about resources required, if you know you are working within limitations (and that's another good reason to supply details of your system when asking a question). There are some areas of the documentation that I think could be improved for us by hinting at, for example, the amount of disk space required. Of course, if I start complaining about this too loudly I'm gonna have to do something about it :-) Maybe I'll take a newbie-look at the Handbook some time soon and see if I'm right or wrong. Actually, since nobody else has come up with this particular dummy-spit before, I might have missed the point somewhere. Please correct me if you think that's so. -- Regards, -*Sue*- To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-newbies" in the body of the message