Date: Sun, 1 Dec 1996 12:29:28 +0100 (MET) From: Greg Lehey <grog@lemis.de> To: phk@critter.tfs.com (Poul-Henning Kamp) Cc: FreeBSD-current@FreeBSD.org (FreeBSD current users), platforms@FreeBSD.org (FreeBSD Platforms), doc@FreeBSD.org (FreeBSD Documenters), committers@FreeBSD.org Subject: Re: FreeBSD/MIPS anybody Message-ID: <199612011129.MAA04186@freebie.lemis.de> In-Reply-To: <544.849436642@critter.tfs.com> from Poul-Henning Kamp at "Dec 1, 96 11:37:22 am"
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(Following up to -doc; this isn't really a -current, -committers, or -platforms issue) Poul-Henning Kamp writes: > In message <199612010831.JAA02306@freebie.lemis.de>, Greg Lehey writes: >> >>> Discussion about a FreeBSD book documenting the internals of VM] >> >> I'm certainly prepared to help on putting this together. Apart from >> anything else, I'll finally be forced to learn something about the >> internals. I'd suggest that we go for more than "the design of the >> FreeBSD 3.0 virtual memory system", though. > > I think I'd like to pull the brake here. I don't see any advantage to > a book over a bunch of SGML/nroff/tex files in the src/share/doc tree. There is the advantage that more people would look at the book if it were there. I think there's a significant inertia which people need to overcome before they print out the papers, and I'd guess that the sources in /src/share/doc don't get formatted too often. But I don't know if the advantage of the book would outweigh its disadvantages, such as getting the thing printed in the first place, the high price you'd have to charge for a relatively low-volume book, and the fact that it would be eternally out of date. > The only possible difference would be some money from the sale of the > book, and quite frankly, I would not even put that in budget for a book of > this kind. It certainly doesn't promise to be a big money-maker. > Instead I'd far rather have us find a volounteer editor and maybe a couple > of writers, who would help make english out of the stuff the kernel hackers > emit, which is, all else being equal, usually closer to C than to any dialect > of English. > > If we manage to pull sufficient material together this way, we can take it > all to some publisher and say, "Here, bunch of Postscript files, call the > book ``FreeBSD -- Under the hood'' and send our money to the FreeBSD project." > > If on the other hand we don't get sufficiently material, which is unfortunately > entirely possible, then we will not have to argue with some editor about it, > but it will be available in the tree, to anybody who want to read it or improve > it. > > This is also far more in line with the "scientific spirit" that was the > foundation of the BSD code on whose shoulders we stand. All this sounds very sensible. > So in summary: If you have something you're good at, or just the only one > who knows something about, you should really sit down and crank some text > out. > > Don't worry about formatting, language or anything like that right > now, just crank out some ASCII file and commit it somewhere not entirely > wrong under src/share/doc. > > Come on guys! > > Documentation is the other 50% of the job! OK. I volunteer to integrate and polish the texts. I've just been leafing through the 4.4BSD kernel book. How about taking something like that as a framework in which to put the documentation, rather like the way the online handbook is structured at the moment? Also, does anybody have more documents stashed away just waiting for publication? > Poul-Henning > Author of the only new paper in share/doc/papers from the FreeBSD project :-( I suppose it says something that I had to go and look for this document. Greg
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