cvs commit: doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/ports/chapter.sgml

[Marc Fonvieille]

On Thu, Jul 19, 2007 at 03:54:10PM +0300, Giorgos Keramidas wrote:
> On 2007-07-19 01:13, Doug Barton <dougb at freebsd.org> wrote:
> >>>     en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/ports chapter.sgml 
> >>>   Log:
> >>>   - Introduce another way for upgrading packages and ports using bpkg(8).
> >>
> >> I'm not sure the Handbook has the vocation to talk about all
> >> available tools to manage ports and packages.  [...]
> >
> > FWIW, I (with portmaster author hat on) am sort of ambivalent about
> > this issue. I've avoided adding anything to that chapter about
> > portmaster because my personal feeling is that a laundry list of
> > tools isn't useful to the user, especially if all the descriptions
> > are the same size as the ones that are there now.
> >
> > What I think would be more useful (and again, I'm speaking only for
> > myself) would be a list of tools available with a brief description
> > of each, and links to outside sources (web pages, pkg-descr files,
> > etc.) where an interested user can get more information. I do think
> > that letting our users know that there are tools available is a good
> > thing, I don't think mini-manuals for each tool is appropriate in
> > that context.
> 
> This sounds nice.
> 
> It would also be nice to have articles like:
> 
>     "Managing thirdparty ports & packages with portupgrade"
>     "Managing thirdparty ports & packages with portmaster"
>     "Managing thirdparty ports & packages with XXX"
> 
> in the doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/... collection, so the Handbook
> can talk about the general, common ideas behind port management, and
> the articles can turn into mini-manuals.
> 
> It may even be possible to talk about one or two (the 'official' port
> management tools), and then move the rest into separate articles.  If
> the tools mentioned in the articles get 'official' status or one of
> the currently official tools gets dropped, or gets stale, we can move
> chunks of the Handbook from articles to the book, or from the book to
> standalone articles.
> 
> Does this sound like something which makes more sense than blowing up
> the size of the Handbook with full manuals about all the available
> tools we have now?
>

That's exactly what I think.  For the moment we have one "official"
management tool: portupgrade, hence this one must be documented in the
ports chapter.  I also feel portmaster may be added in future.
For the other third-party tools, they can be the subject of a specific
article but adding a mini-howto section in the Handbook for each other
tool is not a good thing.

I just looked at
http://www.bsdstats.org/freebsd/ports.php?category=ports-mgmt
just to get an idea of what some (4,982) people use:

bpkg			1
portmanager		210
portmaster		265
portupgrade		1836
portupgrade-devel	552

well portupgrade, beside being mentioned everywhere in UPDATING, is
really used by our community.


--
Marc