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FreeBSD Journal announced

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81 pointsdrallison37 comments

How is it that FreeBSD has such great documentation[1], now this while Linux is stuck with random wikis and blogposts, usually out-of-date?

[1] https://www.freebsd.org/doc/handbook/

Smaller community, more central management.

Linux is seen as a programming platform a lot more than freeBSD.

man pages work wonderfully though.

The man pages that come with FreeBSD are absolutely fantastic and top notch, more so than most of the man pages I have found with Ubuntu for example.

I don't see how Linux being seen as a programming platform makes much if a difference. FreeBSD has a pretty large community as well, but the core community that puts together the OS seems to take much more pride in their work and having it be fully documented than any other open source organisation.

The man pages of BSD are the official documentation. The man pages of, for instance, GNU LibC are not the official documentation. This is:

https://www.gnu.org/software/libc/manual/

Which is the problem with Linux as a whole for me.

WiFi configuration is a particular problem where everything has awful documentation so when you need to set up your WiFi without NetworkManager or some other behemoth, much eye poking and googling on other devices is required.

FreeBSD/OpenBSD/NetBSD: man ifconfig (and dmesg)

As a rule, and this happened to me more than once, you might need to configure your network connection without the aid of Google and online documentation. Either that or you're stuck on a train in the middle of nowhere with no WiFi and no 3G and you want to read the docs.

The official documentation is available on the link I gave, but it should also be available in the Info format on your local drive.

I find it much easier to search Info documents for something than grepping compressed man pages.

Info is horrible. Case in point:

Awk manpage: http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/man.cgi?query=awk

Gawk info (in html): http://www.gnu.org/software/gawk/manual/gawk.html

Both fully describe the capabilities of the software without resorting to compressing it.

Elegance in simplicity.

I disagree; In general, I prefer Info. I would explain why, but that would be repeating myself; I instead refer to my previous post on this very topic:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6656656

I think it's funny that someone else picked exactly the same example however I respect your opinion on the subject.

I develop primarily on FreeBSD (80% C, 20% nodejs) and test for compliance on Centos Linux. My experience is that code written and tested on FreeBSD has so far fewer bugs this way. Package management is more intuitive, too.

Yeah, port system is fantastic. It takes longer, but just works. The whole system is designed to be robust, there's no broken shit if it's done successfully. *It reports error on failure at least.

Linux package managers are fast, but usually broken silently in some ways - which are critical on robustness - and I always discover myself manually doing what port system does.

CentOS packages are relatively more robust, but it's too outdated, and installing new packages nothing different from any other Linux distros.

My experience - and one of the main reasons I switched from BSD to Linux is that the ports sytem is a broken pile of stuff. Yum on CentOS is a joy to work with in comparison.

I see the FreeBSD devs have finally started to see the light with the introduction of Pkgng.

Ports broken? Usually see this complaint when the user has an up to date ports tree, but out of date freebsd install.. Ports doesn't have branches/releases.. So if your fbsd version is no longer supported, you'll start seeing broken ports.

Pkgng is not a replacement for ports.. It's a replacement for the old pkg manager (pkg_*)

I'll repeat what the other guy said. Ports broken?! Not in my 10 years of using it.

I had random ports breaking back in the dark ages.

Turned out to be a dodgy RAM stick in the end. ECC is a requirement for me now when the host machine supports it.

The FreeBSD ports system is wonderful because it lets me vary the version of an application without forcing me to replace world. Yum is great when you want a binary distribution that often lags the latest releases by years. What do you do when you need a more recent PostgreSQL than 8.4? Upgrade your OS? snicker Why should I be forced to disrupt my OS when all I want is an application? I develop in the CentOS environment on a daily basis. I long to return to the simplicity and elegance of FreeBSD.

When you need a newer Pgsql you use http://yum.postgresql.org/

Sure, I'm already using that option. I had to go and find it on my own, at the time. It wasn't as simple as updating the ports collection and installing from ports, but I suppose it's not much different than waiting for a maintainer to update a package and then installing it.

I use ports to mean compile on my own and packages to mean installing precompiled binaries. In my experience, FreeBSD seems more amenable to managing, building, and installing software from source code than a linux distribution. Perhaps I just haven't learned an efficient manner that integrates well with yum/rpm on CentOS? I've always had more dependency nightmares on a linux distro than with FreeBSD. Using FreeBSD's ports collection (single repository) has been less error prone for me than trying to manage all the different yum repos one must manually organize to get up to date software. Am I doing something wrong or is it really that clunky?

Yes, I guess if what you want is to build software from source, then the ports are not THAT bad; but when you want to get a little more generic or care about deployment time (especially when dealing with cloud instances) then the fun goes away. Plus the rolling release nature of the ports sucks arse..

I'm not advocating against FreeBSD, I like FreeBSD and I want to see it again on the table, but the ports are hurting it and its adoption, it needs to go away.

You are quite correct that installing from source doesn't really scale in hosting services. It does take too long and leads to incongruent deployments that may block migration. I don't believe any distribution is well suited for cloud deployment out of the box. I usually deploy from a suite of prepared images via netboot, then customers are free to compile from source or use canned packages.

Linux distros have to do that sort of documentation as there is no standard. There is only really one freebsd distro. Also the change rate is lower.

To certain degree - we've also FreeNAS, PC-BSD and lots of others, listed in details here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_BSD_operating_systems#F...

Thats true, but they are still much closer than Linux distros.

Also to certain degree: see Debian - Ubuntu, RHEL - CentOS and so on ;)

FreeBSD is a 'distribution' and Linux is a 'kernel', which in the context you're discussing is an important distinction. Pick a same-level entity to compare - Fedora? Ubuntu? Arch? Not saying that the documentation is as good, just that the question is apples vs oranges.

In the context it is clear that they used Linux in place of a 'Linux Distribution.' No one was unclear about this.

And the documentation of all Linux distros suck compared to FreeBSD and OpenBSD. Including Arch's.

They have the gnu info pages which comes with emacs. Man pages is a dying artform. With all the github projects out there they may have, if your lucky, a help dialog switch but no proper man page for their projects.

That is missing the point somewhat. The thread starter specifically linked to the FreeBSD handbook. Manual isn't [limited to] man pages here.

I think OpenBSD and Arch has really good documentation too.

The actual link for the future magazine's website (with the same info on freebsdnews.net) --> http://www.freebsdjournal.com/

"The Journal will be a bi-monthly publication and will be available on the web or as an Android/iPhone/Kindle app."

Why make it an app? Making "app" magazines seems really dumb to me, when you could simply make it available in an open format like PDF or ePub or text.

I'm willing to bet it will be available in an open format "on the web".

The additional formats probably exist to serve a wider audience.

It would be nice if I could get it in TeX though.

I think you are the first person I have ever seen say that. If I may ask, what benefits would having it TeX bring to you?

Not speaking for the GP of course, but I often like to see the Latex source of a well laid-out document. I learn from reading it as an example.

There's also BSD Now, which is pretty cool. More BSD coverage is always nice!

Also, there is BSD Magazine too: http://bsdmag.org/

It's great to see many resources for keeping up with the unknown giant nowdays!

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