Talk:Documentation

From NetBSD Wiki

I am honored and glad that you put up this NetBSD Documentation section based on the topics from my bsdwiki book.

I want to point out that these section headers originally came from BSD Certification Group's BSDA Certification Requirements Document published in 2005. That document in whole is Copyright by the BSD Certification Group and licensed under the Creative Commons License which requires Attribution. The bsdwiki received permission to re-use this information in its book under a BSD license. Since then, some of the topics have been re-ordered or renamed (from the original Requirements document).

I don't think that using just the topic/section titles is a problem, but you may want to at least acknowledge their origin (especially since you used many of them).

By the way, the bsdwiki book is a short-term project ending in less than two months. The end result of that project is to have a printed book. Since the content is re-usable (as long as the BSD license is followed), you may want to encourage your wiki users to contribute there instead (at this time) and then pull in the entire results (and edit out the non-NetBSD if desired) when finished.

To me, it does not make sense to divide the efforts on two different projects -- especially when one is short-term and you can re-use its content.

I appreciate this NetBSD wiki site -- it has been useful for me many times. And I have contributed here (such as How_to_upgrade_packages) and will continue to contribute here. Keep up the good work! My only problem is lack of documented licensing. Your pages often link to NetBSD_Wiki:Copyright which is empty.

--Jeremy C. Reed 16:39, 19 January 2007 (CET)

Please move the BSD book away from here

This page's title is too broad to contain a whole book, which is in large parts also available elsewhere (as Jeremy already mentioned). This page should be restricted to give an overview about where to find documentation, which general topics are available, and the like.

Especially, since you mention in the first paragraph that This is the NetBSD System Manager's Manual, why don't you make up a new page with exactly that name?

--Rillig 05:08, 25 January 2007 (CET)

I picked up the topics from Jeremy's Book, that's correct. But since Jeremy's book covers all BSD's, I wanted a documentation to cover only NetBSD. So, I changed the topics to fit. I also changed the Name from "Systems Administration Book" to NetBSD System Manager's Manual --> This is the topic of every NetBSD Man page. Since Jeremy's book is strongly FreeBSD and OpenBSD focused, it isn't possible to import any useful documentation for NetBSD. As a solution, I picked up only the topics and will try to write the contents by myself / by our users. zafer 14:07, 25 January 2007 (CET)

What about adding the NetBSD contents to the bsdwiki book? That might have the effect that the bsdwiki book doesn't "cover only FreeBSD and OpenBSD". --Rillig 08:32, 26 January 2007 (CET)

The bsdwiki book should NOT be strongly focused on FreeBSD and OpenBSD. The book is based on objectives defined by the BSD-neutral Certification Group. In fact, the Requirements document that it is based on was edited with a lot of feedback from two vocal NetBSD advocates. And NetBSD is the preferred operating system of the editor of the bsdwiki book :) At this time, the bsdwiki is in progress and will be finished at the end of February. If for any reason, its content is biased or doesn't cover NetBSD adequately, please edit it or complain!

One thing to note though is the current bsdwiki book has very specific goals and purposes and will not and can not grow and expand beyond its goals -- so it won't be very detailed or highly technical for the "advanced" administrator. Probably I will organize the advanced book in 11 months from now. (By the way, I'd like to put some energies into the existing NetBSD Guide to make it book worthy within the next six months.) --Reed 04:00, 27 January 2007 (CET)