Alexander E. Patrakov wrote: > (sorry for the overall pessimistic tone) > Robert Daniels wrote: > > >> My first point is one that has brought up before. We need better >> descriptions of the packages and why you might want them. We all do a >> wonderful job of documenting build dependencies, instructions, and >> methodologies, but less so on why we are building things. >> > > So, in other words, you want concrete example use cases to be documented in > BLFS. Good idea. > > >> Second, I find that there is an almost total lack of information on how >> to make the various pieces work together. >> > > I think this happens because many packages are added just as (possibly > optional) > dependencies of something else. For such cases, it is easy to fall into the > trap > of presenting the minimal instructions sufficient only for a package being > found > by its reverse dependencies. Probably, this can be solved by adding the > mandatory "examples" section to each package (even library packages, where > some > reverse dependency of the library is called, e.g., for libIDN, show how to > get > the contents of http://räksmörgås.josefsson.org/ using cURL). > >
> OTOH, some time ago we had a fully written Courier MTA setup example (by Jim > Gifford), that was removed (presumably because nobody was interested). I > think > that, before we start implementing Alan's "course modules" suggestion, we > should > first find out what went wrong in the Courier case, in order to avoid > repeating > mistakes that led to this situation. > > In the particular case of Robert's example, it's not just an LFS/BLFS failing. Network authentication, in all possible options, is very poorly documented. Getting everythiong to work together is not just a build and go by adding users, it's a build and add users and test and rebuild and add users and reconfigure and test and ............. [ ad nauseum ] N.I.S. [ sunsYP ] is just as bad as the kerberos/ldap/sasl/postgresql/mysql/pam options when it comes to documentation to get everything working together correctly. I've been fighting getting network authentication to work right with Suse, Fedora-core, Centos, PCLinuxOS, Ubuntu, Mandriva, and Debian. none have good docs on the subject. haven't found them with google. heck, even TLDP's NAG is useless on the subject. I'm almost considering installing SAMBA to see if it is any better, on a 100% Linux network. -- http://linuxfromscratch.org/mailman/listinfo/blfs-dev FAQ: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/faq.html Unsubscribe: See the above information page
