Date: Wed, 18 Oct 2000 21:15:46 -0400 From: bobj@atlantic.net To: freebsd-doc@FreeBSD.ORG Cc: peter@sysadmin-inc.com Subject: Re: How To's Message-ID: <200010190115.VAA00566@moscow.atlantic.net> In-Reply-To: <001401c037ad$e24645e0$47010a0a@fire.sysadmininc.com> References: <001401c037ad$e24645e0$47010a0a@fire.sysadmininc.com>
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Quoting Peter Brezny <peter@sysadmin-inc.com>: > I've been disappointed with the aparent absence of HOW TO documents for > freebsd (at least that can be located from the freebsd.org website). > > bsdtoday has a how too link, and i was surprised to find exactly what i was > looking for, through that site, but located at > > http://people.freebsd.org/~jkb/howto.html > > This is exactly the document I was looking for. > > Why don't we have a how too link on the freebsd main page? > There is a Tutorial link on the main FreeBSD page, but there is such a small handful of stuff on the page that your complaint is still entirely valid. There seem to be a LOT of useful web pages on various FreeBSD.org servers that would be a wonderful resource if people only knew about them. For instance, there is a mail archive that is actually useful, but I forget its URL. A "miscellaneous documentation" section of the main FreeBSD site could have pointers to a lot of these unpolished, but extremely useful, documents and web pages. I think it would be very helpful. Obviously, the people who create those pages would have to notify the web page maintainer(s) about them, but that should be easier than having to post the same URL to the -questions or -stable list every other week. > I feel that this type of usefull information could really help if it were > also included in the documentation that comes with freebsd. There's a > wealth of information about the specifics of how to write complex ipfw > rules, but I've not been able to find a single document that gives you the > bare bones of what you need to do to enable ipfw. The closes i found on > the > distribution documentation is an article about dialup ppp firewalling, and > it appears to be out of date to the point that the instructions don't work > with freebsd 4.1. > > Please consider putting together a HOW TO page and putting a link to it on > the main freebsd site under documentation. We need it. Another link that would be useful is to www.freebsddiary.org. It has a lot of the sort of informal how-to stuff that does a great job of supplementing the formal docs at FreeBSD.org. Rather than try to duplicate the effort that went into that site, provide a prominent link to it (perhaps on the tutorials page) so that people can still got to FreeBSD.org as their first resource for docs. They may end up at FreeBSDdiary, or BSDtoday, but they will know they can get there by starting at FreeBSD.org. Another way of saying what I mean is that in addition to providing links to alternate documentation sites on the "more..." (docs.html) page, they should also be prominently featured on pages where their content would be appropriate if it were integrated into the FreeBSD pages. That way a person looking for, say, a tutorial on the tutorials page would find at the end of the page a link that says something like "More FreeBSD tutorials are available at the FreeBSD Diary, and at FreeBSD HowTo's for the Lazy and Hopeless", or something like that. I think the bottom line is that unpolished documentation is better than no documentation at all, and rather than let pride lead us to try to cram it all into the FreeBSD site, we should try to make better use of the other resources that already exist by making it easy for someone who is looking for FreeBSD information on the main site to find information that happens to be on other sites. That would allow us to still provide "one stop shopping", but do it by making efficient use of the other resources. I'm not claiming that I know exactly how to best accomplish this, but I think that more liberal use of links to other web sites would be a good start. > > Peter Brezny > SysAdmin Services, Inc. > - Bob Johnson ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This mail sent through Atlantic.Net Webmail: http://webmail.atlantic.net/ To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-doc" in the body of the message
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