On Friday 26 January 2007 17:12, Dmitriy Kropivnitskiy wrote: >Gene Heskett wrote: >> Why did you snip the rest of my comment about the manpages? Or was >> that in a subsequent message since this seems to be bouncing back and >> forth between private mail and the list? I don't know and this has >> gone on long enough with nothing but shouting and handwaving which is >> bound to upset the rest of the readers of this list. >> >> I stated precisely what was wrong with those manpages and I see no >> reason not to say it out loud. Docs don't get fixed if we are not >> allowed to fault them and those are damned sure faulty. > >I am not saying the documents are perfect. And I will stipulate that man > pages are an outdated form of documentation which should be abolished, > not updated. Why abolish? If they are to be abolished, then there had better be a usable alternative that is just as easily used put in their place. Info files might be ok if one could ever figure out a reliable way to navigate through the tree. A manpage is nice and simple, you just scroll up and down to find what you want, if its in there. As for an alternative such as DocBook, I have a lot of those that were on the FC2 box, and may be on this one too, but I have yet, and with considerable frustration, to see a single character displayed on my screen from one of those docbook files. DocBook, as an executable file, does not exist in my $PATH, and it has no manpage, none, nada. In other words, there (apparently) is no bridge connecting a user of manpages that can convert him to a docbook reader. > I only mentioned man pages because you claimed there > aren't any. As I have said again and again there are a lot of > comprehensive documents on the web about configuration, customization > and inner workings of selinux. They are one google search away. > >> They (the definitions of those vars shown in UPPERCASE) don't exist in >> those manpages and no amount of ignoring that fact is ever going to >> make it right. > >I am looking at the man page and I don't see any "uppercase cariables" > except the normal man page standard to write command switch arguments > in uppercase (FILE, CONTEXT etc.). What are you refering to? That's exactly what I said. You call them 'command switch arguments', but no place in those small pieces of electronic tp are those arguments, and what they actually do when invoked, defined. There is concise writing, and I give you either of the K&R books as prime examples, every keyword and datatype is defined with no ambiguity exactly once in each book. And there is writing that's so concise as to be total non-sense to a person whose IQ was only 147 when tested 60 years ago. Usually written by someone who took a technical writing course but doesn't know WTH they are talking about, before or after a 24 pack of suds. If I was from Texas I'd say they were all hat & no cattle. :) >> So enough already, fix the selinux related manpages so WE, the users, >> can fix our own stumbles. It really, really is that simple. The documentation is NOT there, and doubly so if you are trying to troubleshoot a net connection that isn't working. Where then are you going to find the info? That's what bugs me, everybody points at google, but what if google isn't available because your net won't come up? I repeat, fix the manpages by fixing my squawks above about the definitions. >This is silly. As I have said time and again, the documentation is > there, if you do not read it you will not be able to fix things. > >> As for your comment re the src, I turned on a few fedora src links in >> my yum.repos.d and never did find the srcs for selinux. > >Where exactly did you look? In quite a few of the fedora repos containing the word source in their names. base, core, updates and extras to start with. >For kernel parts of selinux just install kernel sources. For the selinux >libraries and utilities yumdownloader --source libselinux. Where exactly > did you look for the sources? No clue to lead me to them, and how was I to know I should have been searching for 'lib'selinux. Surely all these 'tools' are not all in the libselinux src archive? I see all sorts of rpms for the rest of selinux, available as binary rpms... But, I'll have to hang my head and plead guilty for giving up when there was no selinx-version.src.rpm to be sucked. -- Cheers, Gene "There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order." -Ed Howdershelt (Author) Yahoo.com and AOL/TW attorneys please note, additions to the above message by Gene Heskett are: Copyright 2007 by Maurice Eugene Heskett, all rights reserved.
