Hi John,
Thanks for the hints. I'm new to LEAF, and the nuances of Bering and
Bering-uClibc are not obvious to the novice. Silly me, I believed the
documentation on the web site, which clearly states that pci-scan is
required by tulip.
Please refer to "Project: LEAF - Linux Embedded Appliance Firewall:
Document Manager" (http://sourceforge.net/docman/?group_id=13751),
section 03, "Installation and Initial Configuration Questions
Answered", the document titled, "How Do I make LEAF see my Ethernet
cards" (http://sourceforge.net/docman/display_doc.php?
docid=1418&group_id=1375).
That document clearly states: (...)
I don't want to get technical with you - but did you check the date on
that document? At the top of the page, it says, "Date: 2002-03-01". So,
that document could not have possibly referred to Bering uClibc 2.2.3
(which was released on 2005-01-25, according to the file release area),
or kernel 2.4.26 (which, according to the date of the changelog file on
kernel.org was released on 14-Apr-2004).
I don't debate the fact that there's old documentation around, and that
this documentation is plain wrong for current distros.
As far as I'm concerned, the only "authoritive" source of information
for Bering uClibc is the Bering-uClibc [Installation|Users|Developers]
Guide available at http://leaf.sourceforge.net/doc/guide/. Everything
else might work, but might not - it is not kept up to date by the people
who work on Bering uClibc. I guess this fact is not explicitly pointed
out on the sourceforge page (so I don't blame you for simply going by
what the docs say).
Thanks again for the help, and you might consider updating the
documentation on the web page such that it reflects current reality.
We might - but then, as far as I know, we already have, for the guides
(which is, as far as I know, what most of the people use). If you have
suggestions for how those guides could be improved, we'd be happy to
implement them (before you ask, no, as far as I know, I don't have
access to docmanager, so I can't make those documents obsolete - heck,
for all I know, they may well tell the perfect truth for Bering).
It is difficult to meet the needs of our userbase - there are people who
know Linux well (which would most likely include all the developers),
for whom it would be "self evident" that one checks modules.dep for
dependencies of modules. Other users don't have that knowledge (and it
could be argued that they need not have to, since they're users. At
least, that could be said of commercial products. But then, with
commercial product, one usually pays for support...).
Until somebody makes us aware of the fact that this is actually not
"common knowledge", it will most likely not be explicitly pointed out in
the docs.
And then, even if it were, the sad thing usually is that many people
would miss or simply not read that information. In the end (just like
with most other Open Source projects), the documentation tends to
suffer, since the developers already know it, and the users won't read
it anyway (over-simplifying, I know). It seems to me that LEAF has done
quite well in providing documentation, but I'm not going to argue the
fact that it's not perfect yet (but then, only obsolete projects are
_completely_ documented ;-))
I hope that sheds some light on the difficulties the developers are
facing (afterall, those people are working on a _product_ first, and on
the docs whenever they have enough time...). Again, if you have some
insight on what needs to be done to make things better, we'll be happy
to fix those things (as far as the individual can "fix" things).
Martin
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