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The Power to Serve – FreeBSD Power Management

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Re: The Power to Serve – FreeBSD Power Management

#11

Post by vermaden »

wk_end wrote: post #6
vermaden wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for comment. I generally agree with you, that I should now check what is available in the Handbook and submit patches to make it better but I have very unpleasant memory from the past. There was time when VirtualBox was not available on FreeBSD, no one even thought about writing Bhyve and QEMU was only 'virtualization' option on FreeBSD (with KQEMU accelerator module). As I used FreeBSD I even made a howto - H…

Without meaning to offend or diminish the work you did, I want to defend the FreeBSD project here. Consider the code version of what you linked above. Imagine submitting a patch in the form of an HTML post on a private website (wrong format), in poor and non-idiomatic style (both for the project and the language itself), full of typos and grammatical errors (bugs?), with the author themselves professing that it's "no…

It was long time ago and and today it would probably look better but still zero response is not a good sign either.

Re: The Power to Serve – FreeBSD Power Management

#12

Post by vermaden »

reniflex wrote: post #8

FreeBSD is deprecated. Supporting the project is supporting far-left software terrorists. Please use OpenBSD: https://www.openbsd.org/

OpenBSD has its own problems, for example packages for RELEASE are built only once at the release date and never touched later, like in the old FreeBSD days.

That lefts OpenBSD users with software containing security holes and bugs. IMHO OpenBSD should create a pkg(8) equivalent (or even port it/import it like openssl) to have up to date packages at least for RELEASE.

Re: The Power to Serve – FreeBSD Power Management

#13

Post by rleigh »

int_19h wrote: post #9
Carpetsmoker wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Back when I started using FreeBSD in the 4.x days the handbook was an extremely valuable and useful resource. For many years I touted it as a good advantage of FreeBSD over Linux, whose documentation was (and to some degree, still is) quite poor and scattered over many places. I haven't used FreeBSD in quite a few years, but I'm sad to hear it's no longer what it was :-( Looking at the source it looks like they went…

It's written in DocBook, which is hardly obscure.

No, but it is horribly verbose and a pain to work with. I personally find the flow of writing to be constantly interrupted with the demand to mark everything up just so, and for very technical documents with a lot of markup, the markup can dwarf the content several times over!

While they are less powerful, markdown, restructured text and other simpler markup languages are much more productive to work with. They are easier for beginners to understand, and the markup is sufficiently lightweight for most of the common cases that it doesn't interrupt your train of thought while trying to think about how to best describe complex technical details.

Re: The Power to Serve – FreeBSD Power Management

#14

Post by rleigh »

vermaden wrote: post #11
wk_end wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Without meaning to offend or diminish the work you did, I want to defend the FreeBSD project here. Consider the code version of what you linked above. Imagine submitting a patch in the form of an HTML post on a private website (wrong format), in poor and non-idiomatic style (both for the project and the language itself), full of typos and grammatical errors (bugs?), with the author themselves professing that it's "no…

It was long time ago and and today it would probably look better but still zero response is not a good sign either.

Volunteer time often means that if something isn't immediately actionable, or actionable with minimum effort, it gets ignored, and then it gets forgotten. It's not malicious, it's just the reality of things.

If you had obtained the handbook from version control, and added this as a new file using the markup language in use, made sure it built without warnings or errors, proofread the HTML and PDF output, and then sent that in as a patch, it would have been mergeable with no effort other than a brief review.

If the people reviewing it also had to completely rewrite it in the correct markup language, and they are not domain experts in the material it is covering, then you've basically given them a task which is hugely demanding upon their time.

I've had several experiences of this. Sometimes it pays to pull all the stops out and spoonfeed the recipients with something which is as perfect as it can be, and they have no reason not to merge it. It takes a lot more time on the part of the submitter, but that's time you've saved the reviewer, by giving them a finished article. This can greatly improve the chances of success, by removing obstacles which would hinder it.

Re: The Power to Serve – FreeBSD Power Management

#15

Post by vermaden »

Carpetsmoker wrote: post #7
AndrewBissell wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I was playing with FreeBSD a lot in late 2017/early 2018, I had a ton of time wasted following outdated chapters in the Handbook. It became very frustrating once I found the 7th or 8th "this part of the Handbook is outdated" post on the FreeBSD forums. Kinda funny, because the Handbook is often touted as something which is supposed to make it very welcoming to beginners.

Back when I started using FreeBSD in the 4.x days the handbook was an extremely valuable and useful resource. For many years I touted it as a good advantage of FreeBSD over Linux, whose documentation was (and to some degree, still is) quite poor and scattered over many places. I haven't used FreeBSD in quite a few years, but I'm sad to hear it's no longer what it was :-( Looking at the source it looks like they went…

Long time no see :)

Re: The Power to Serve – FreeBSD Power Management

#16

Post by vermaden »

rleigh wrote: post #14
vermaden wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was long time ago and and today it would probably look better but still zero response is not a good sign either.

Volunteer time often means that if something isn't immediately actionable, or actionable with minimum effort, it gets ignored, and then it gets forgotten. It's not malicious, it's just the reality of things. If you had obtained the handbook from version control, and added this as a new file using the markup language in use, made sure it built without warnings or errors, proofread the HTML and PDF output, and then sen…

Thanks, I will try that path then.

Re: The Power to Serve – FreeBSD Power Management

#17

Post by znpy »

vermaden wrote: post #12
reniflex wrote: post #8

FreeBSD is deprecated. Supporting the project is supporting far-left software terrorists. Please use OpenBSD: https://www.openbsd.org/

OpenBSD has its own problems, for example packages for RELEASE are built only once at the release date and never touched later, like in the old FreeBSD days. That lefts OpenBSD users with software containing security holes and bugs. IMHO OpenBSD should create a pkg(8) equivalent (or even port it/import it like openssl) to have up to date packages at least for RELEASE.

You can run NetBSD's pkgsrc on OpenBSD if you need something like that.

Re: The Power to Serve – FreeBSD Power Management

#18

Post by oh5nxo »

vermaden wrote: post #16
rleigh wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Volunteer time often means that if something isn't immediately actionable, or actionable with minimum effort, it gets ignored, and then it gets forgotten. It's not malicious, it's just the reality of things. If you had obtained the handbook from version control, and added this as a new file using the markup language in use, made sure it built without warnings or errors, proofread the HTML and PDF output, and then sen…

Thanks, I will try that path then.

Just as random someone who likes reading your posts, maybe there's a third way: An appendix in handbook that links to blogs like yours.

I see that there already is "an aggregation feed of dozens of blogs" linking to planet.freebsd.org which does not respond :)

Re: The Power to Serve – FreeBSD Power Management

#19

Post by vermaden »

oh5nxo wrote: post #18
vermaden wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks, I will try that path then.

Just as random someone who likes reading your posts, maybe there's a third way: An appendix in handbook that links to blogs like yours. I see that there already is "an aggregation feed of dozens of blogs" linking to planet.freebsd.org which does not respond :)

Good idea.

There is also FreeBSD Community Resources wiki page - https://wiki.freebsd.org/Community/Resources - which contains links to such blogs and resources.

Re: The Power to Serve – FreeBSD Power Management

#20

Post by tachion »

rleigh wrote: post #14
vermaden wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was long time ago and and today it would probably look better but still zero response is not a good sign either.

Volunteer time often means that if something isn't immediately actionable, or actionable with minimum effort, it gets ignored, and then it gets forgotten. It's not malicious, it's just the reality of things. If you had obtained the handbook from version control, and added this as a new file using the markup language in use, made sure it built without warnings or errors, proofread the HTML and PDF output, and then sen…

In case of documentation PR's the doc team is openly accepting properly written (technically, grammatically and so on) plain text documents and takes the burden of writing the proper docxml patch on them, simply get in touch with them vi Problem Report or IRC or mailing list :)
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