On Tue, Oct 18, 2011 at 12:56:12AM -0500, DJ Lucas wrote: > On 10/17/2011 11:42 PM, Ken Moffat wrote: > > > (Still thinking about the other parts of the responses) > > BTW - please don't treat this as an attempt to deter you from editing > BLFS, > > I've spent enough time on that unpleasant task, suffer it if you wiah ;-) > > That's a little too positive there Ken, don't you think? :-) > > -- DJ Lucas > For those who are expert in xml, changes are in principle straightforward. For myself, lacking that expertise, simply editing the BLFS book can be a lot harder than editing LFS.
First, the organisation (a historical legacy). 'find' is key to this. Then the plethora of information - at some time or other, an editor has thought it worthy of inclusion, so it should not be lightly discarded. Thus, extra build or documentation instructions should, if possible, be tested. Eventually, I would get to a place where I thoght my changes were worth rendering, to see how they looked. On my old machine rendering was a slow process, but a modern machine is not so bad. The really slow part is working out what broke when a change fails to render - a lot of the time, the error (mostly, mismatched tags) is not obvious. The syntax highlighting in vim usually helps, but (particularly if you are adding several related pages), it can still be hard to find the problem. 'svn diff' has helped me in those cases, followed by a slap to the head ;-) Also, fixing up oddities - BLFS mostly assumes that package authors know best, but there can still be a lot of fine-tuning to get everything in the right place. After that, of course, repeat until it looks ok. Then check the indexing (in longindex.html), particularly when you add a package. That's not counting any possible "these other 20 packages, some with obscure dependencies, can use the package I want to edit" scenarios - those other packages need to be treated on their merits, or lack of (e.g. the protracted testing for openssl-1.0 after it had earlier broken something). While I had the time, and thought I was commiting useful things, it was worth doing even though it usually took a lot more time than I wanted to spend on it. But my primary interest is in using a system, so I've acquired a much stronger interest in trying to minimise the vulnerabilities, as well as developing other interests. Even for those of us who have trouble sleeping, there are only 24 hours in a day :) ĸen -- das eine Mal als Tragödie, das andere Mal als Farce -- http://linuxfromscratch.org/mailman/listinfo/blfs-dev FAQ: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/faq.html Unsubscribe: See the above information page
