Date: Mon, 27 Nov 1995 16:47:30 -0700 (MST) From: Terry Lambert <terry@lambert.org> To: lyndon@orthanc.com (Lyndon Nerenberg) Cc: grog@lemis.de, hackers@FreeBSD.org Subject: Re: Where is the documentation for ibcs2? Message-ID: <199511272347.QAA19930@phaeton.artisoft.com> In-Reply-To: <199511272219.OAA22303@multivac.orthanc.com> from "Lyndon Nerenberg" at Nov 27, 95 02:19:43 pm
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> If you guys expended 1% of the effort you've invested in bitching about > the missing man page into just writing a bloody man page this thread just > might dry up and blow away. That'd probably be true, IF this were a problem that a man page could fix. It's NOT. What would you suggest for content? You have to know that you want IBCS2 to run SCO binaries... did you know that before the discussion started? "Intel Binary Compatability Standard, Version 2" hardly leaps to mind when someone says "SCO". Personally, I think of SCO. There isn't a "FreeBSD" man page yet. You have to have an existing SCO system to get the shared libraries from. The audience is now limited to people who are aware that COFF format IBCS2 binaries are what SCO runs, and who already own SCO systems. You have to manually install the libraries once you have them, since they can't be legally distributed. Now we're limited to people who used to run SCO, but now don't, but they've kept their SCO binaries. You can't get the libraries off the SCO install disk without a lot of work that varies from SVO minor version to minor version. We're now limited to people who are aware that COFF format IBCS2 binaries are what SCO runs, already own SCO systems, and have SCO on a hard drive somewhere so that they can pull the libraries of an existing system. So lets all spend weeks writing stuff up for this limited audience, right? You have to have certain kernel options for binary compatability. This is an integration problem, not a documentation problem. Once it's handled, it won't need doc, and handling it is less work. Why hasn't it been handled? The code isn't to the "package it for end users stage" yet. It's still being changed, it's still fluid. You have to understand the whole concept of an emulation environment better than a man page could explain it to install any binaries that would be useful in the environment once you had it. Somone needs to document that first -- only that's probably going to be changing because of some of the non-Intel architecture work and some of the system call interface changes that have been proposed. So any doc written now is going to be outdated before it is published. At the current state of developement, you are suggesting something as large as, or larger than, the WINE FAQ. Where is the "wine man page"? The usability problems are currently a big hulking behemoth. You can't fix them using a man page as a bandaid. Now do you understand? Regards, Terry Lambert terry@lambert.org --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers.
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