On Sat, Jan 23, 2016 at 11:14:22PM +0100, Ingo Schwarze wrote: > Hi, > > ty armour wrote on Sat, Jan 23, 2016 at 04:29:07PM -0500: > > > I am looking for tutorials on developing any and every aspect of > > OpenBSD, from bootloaders to device drivers to writing a > > raspberry pi image of OpenBSD. > > > > The more tutorials the better, > > OpenBSD developers tend to think the opposite. We highly value > reference documentation, in particular manual pages. If you need > more details than the manual pages offer, read the source code. In > general, we discourage writing tutorials because they are often > written by people who barely know what they are talking about, > because they encourage the wrong style of learning (gobbling together > random bits and pieces without real understanding), and because > they are almost impossible to maintain. Besides, developers prefer > to spend their time on code rather than on tutorials. > > So please don't write tutorials, write reference manuals. > > > because it allows the end user to not only provide useful feedback > > to the developers, it allows the user to customize their install > > in a safe and easy manner. > > OpenBSD developers tend to think the opposite. We generally > discourage gratuitious customization, highly value sane defaults > and encourage using them as much as possible. It helps security, > it helps to work on someone else's system when you need to, and > it tremendously helps support. Customization breeds bugs and > hurts interoperability. > > > You could post tutorials for writing custom audio and graphics > > frameworks too as I am looking to write a few frameworks myself. > > OpenBSD developers tend to avoid writing frameworks as much as > possible - of course, some frameworks must exist, but as few as > possible. Usually, the less abstraction, the better. It makes > code easier to understand, audit, and debug. > > [...] > > including how to get software to run under openbsd > > That does exist and is maintained: > > http://www.openbsd.org/faq/ports/ > http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/man.cgi/OpenBSD-current/man5/bsd.port.mk.5 > > Yours, > Ingo >
OpenBSD is NOT like all those other operating systems out there. Not liking Windows, I tried a few Linux distributions. I wasn't thrilled. Then I stumbled on a web page that described OpenBSD. I thought, this is exactly the kind of OS I want to use and learn. So, with basically no Unix/BSD experience, I needed a webserver in the late 90's. I found a company that offered servers and could install OpenBSD for me during setup. So from there out, I got my OpenBSD training running a webserver and upgrading to new versions, building ports, etc. Manual pages are terse, but usually contain all of the pertinent facts needed. Nobody trained me and I used the FAQ and after trying to figure things out, I asked questions on the misc@ or ports@ mailing lists. You can search for other people's similar questions at http://marc.info. Do that first before posting to the mailing lists. Frankly, if you can't figure it out mostly on your own, consider something besides OpenBSD. I have given up on trying to get anyone to use OpenBSD. Waste of my time. Briefly, I wanted to try and translate some of the more important daily use man pages into Spanish (stuff like in /bin /sbin /usr/bin /usr/sbin). I gave up on that stupid idea. Thanks Ingo for setting me straight on that one! I write perl and sh programs, but the command line has enormous powers to do incredible tasks. IMHO, read and understand the man page on ksh. Read the mandoc man page. It can convert man pages into many different formats (HTML, PDF, etc). Get a book on Korn shell programming and the "Llama Book" called Learning Perl. Learn that much and also read carefully ALL of the man pages for everything in /bin /sbin /usr/bin /usr/sbin. After that, see if you, not us, wants to write any tutorials. Bet you won't want to! And a lot of changes keep happening. Hurray! So I am going to follow my own advice and reread all of those man pages again myself. Have fun! Chris Bennett
