On Sat, 10 Aug 2013 17:51:43 +0100 Kaya Saman wrote: > I > think it's much harder to learn since the documentation is more 'sparse' > and also much more limited in certain areas.... kernel PPP daemon for > example :-) - it took me a while to figure out how to get PPPoE working.
Well I agree and disagree here. It is harder to set up though quicker, possibly to keep average users and their demands from tying up the limited resources OpenBSD has to do things right but is actually easier in many respects too, especially to get secure setups. Kernel ppp may be one of the only examples on OpenBSD where the docs may not be as complete and in one location (interface setup too) as they could be partly because you normally just run it and it does the job and you have just happened to have hit this one example early on in your usage. The userland ppp requires and has a lot of documentation but lacks the performance. In fact I have only recently begun to fully understand why the pkg system supports signing packages but it is only usable by users and not used on the provided packages. I believe it is because a build system is actually very difficult to secure and a system that builds everything all day everyday is quite likely to give a false sense of security (though still be secure enough for the majority), if you require this level of security you better think twice focus in and sign yourself. On a whole good OpenBSD documentation is one of OpenBSD's aims and it shows possibly but only partly because OpenBSD is made by the users for the users. I rarely have to resort to often incorrect websites or download configs on OpenBSD (sudoers, ssh, login.conf, rc.conf, openssl) and everything such as configs are always in a sane often single and logical place. This is the opposite atleast with RedHat technologies where the man pages could be called summaries rather than manuals e.g. Polkit, udev (last_action, events), PAM leading to accusations of them ignoring users and wanting to bolster enterprise usage and support contracts and all over the place leading to uncertainty and lack of control and sometimes the usage of commandline tools other than text editors.
