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Date:      Thu, 13 Dec 2001 01:52:55 +0100
From:      Cliff Sarginson <cliff@raggedclown.net>
To:        questions@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Peeking over the parapet [ Was Re: /etc/hosts file ?  FBSD doc suck ]
Message-ID:  <20011213005255.GA9242@raggedclown.net>
In-Reply-To: <009001c18351$54adf200$0a00000a@atkielski.com>
References:  <15383.50879.147812.912148@guru.mired.org> <009001c18351$54adf200$0a00000a@atkielski.com>

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Hello,

An Open Letter to AA Anonymous.

Is it safe to go into the water again ?
Surely this thread will have kept "him" warm and cosy
for at least a few days now.

Jeez.
Let me stick my oar in here, because I am getting sick of the
preaching of the likes of Anthony A. who seems to be the authority
on all and everything.

The man page on hosts.
It assumes you know what an Ip address is, what a host/domain name is
and what the word alias means.
It then tells you how to construct a file with this information in it.

That is it's job done.
It is not a tutorial on IP addressing, name resolution, domains, IP
dotted-quad notation etc. There are dozens of books on that, and you
don't need a BSD specific one. The format of the hosts file is what
it is there to explain. Would you expect a man page on bunzip2 to give
you all the mathematics involved in it's compression algorithms ?

A man page is not a tutorial document, it is a concisei description.
often written in a very formal way (you would not want to learn how to
use a shell from it's man page, but you may need a reminder of some
syntactical thing, for example).

If you don't understand IP addressing then buy a f*cking book about it.

If a man page is opaque, then offer a rewrite of it, all the time you
spend (and you know who *you* are) lecturing everyone on this list could
be better spent doing that, i.e. something useful.

But now we have endless nonsense about NT versus BSD desktops, uptime statistics,
and now deficiencies in documentation. Some people have to pay for
connection time to download this horse-shit before they confine it to
the dustbin it belongs in.

Instead of pointing at the problem, as you see it, make a practical 
contribution to it instead of eating bandwidth with your smart-arse
junk.

So there.

And that is from someone who hardly ever loses their temper.
Congratulations.

You are back on my kill-list.

-- 
Regards
Cliff



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