Date: Wed, 1 Mar 2017 04:29:38 +0100 From: "Peter Looyenga" <pl@catslair.org> To: <freebsd-doc@freebsd.org> Subject: Introduction & question / comment regarding source tree documentation Message-ID: <000001d2923c$117af6d0$3470e470$@catslair.org>
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Hi guys, Disclaimer: I went over the mailinglist archives a little bit but it doesn't help that I don't necessarily like mailinglists and personally prefer the comforts of a web forum. But I'll cope :) I've been using FreeBSD for quite a few years now, I more or less switched from Solaris to FreeBSD. That is: I also have my share of Linux usage, but in general I always considered Linux a decent way of keeping my Solaris experiences fresh (before you could purchase Solaris/x86). Well, we all know what happened to Sun I assume, and that made me fully move onto FreeBSD. I literally never looked back. I'm a bit on and off on the FreeBSD forums, already wrote a decent (?) share of guides, and right now I hope that I can help contribute a bit more to the documentation project. Because one thing which I always admired on FreeBSD was its set of very mature and good to follow documentation. But I'm also starting to spot some issues, so yeah: instead of "complaining" about those I'd like to try and help address those. My current drive: I can't help feel that the steps required to obtain the source tree aren't very well explained, and as a result several people and up confused. To put it more blunt, this thread is what drove me to try and take more action: https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/59919/ I know that 23.4 in the handbook explains how to track the development branches. But what bugs me is that the actual SVN url's are very deeply buried away. A regular user will have to take a lot of effort before realizing that svn://svn.freebsd.org/base/stable is actually pointing to a developer snapshot instead of a stable version of the whole thing. Also: svn://svn.freebsd/base/current isn't even directly mentioned (only -CURRENT, yet without the associated URL) which I think is also adding up to confusing users. I also think it doesn't help that section A.3 (Using subversion) still talks about stable/9 and stable/10 even though 9 is already EOL (see here: https://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/svn.html#svn-mirr ors). Although I can absolutely agree that it does serve well as a general example. But I also think it's an oversight not to include examples on how to check out the current stable (RELENG) source tree in the chapter about using Subversion. As such I read up on the procedures which one needs to follow and I'm already getting my hands behind the documentation source. My only concern (and actual question): Is this already work in progress by any chance? I don't mind spending a good amount of time on writing up some documentation, but I have a little bit of a problem with setting something up only to find out that it wasn't needed at all. Note: I don't mind if I send in suggestions and then see them not getting accepted, that's all part of the game. But it would be bad for me when I start working on this, only to discover that someone else was already working on it so I basically ended up wasting my time. Hope you guys can give me some pointers on this. And thanks in advance for any comments you can give me! Kind regards, Peter -- .\\ OpenPGP public key: http://www.catslair.org/shelluser.asc +- S/MIME semi-private Root CA: http://ssl.catslair.org/catslair.crt
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