Solved Updating the FreeBSD Handbook

A

Atsuri

When setting up the Linux Flash plugin with emulators/linux-c6, www/firefox, www/linux-c6-flashplugin11 and www/nspluginwrapper I noticed that the information on www/chromium and Flash is completely out-of-date and misleading, because Chromium no longer relies on Netscape plugins, but uses its own plugin (Pepperflash) by Google. Also, Opera 11 is completely deprecated and for security reasons should probably not be used.

That's just one sub-section of the Handbook that is outdated. Most likely there are more.

Does anyone know of an initiative to update the FreeBSD Handbook and if not, do you [community] think it is needed?

I am aware that most of us would be able to figure things out by ourselves, with some support from Uncle Google, but for newcomers and for the sake of correctness, I believe that the Handbook requires some maintenance.

Thoughts? :)
 
Good luck. The maintainers are reluctant to outside refinement from the community. There's lots of things wrong with the Handbook, but it's the best we've got and still quite good.
 
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Atsuri said:
...I noticed that the information on ... Flash is completely out-of-date and misleading...
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I'll say. Even suggesting that people install Flash misleads them into believing it's not a worthless hunk of garbage. Any website that still uses it is at least 4-5 years behind the times. Also, while I'm no mind reader, I would guess the reason that section hasn't really gotten any attention is because www/chromium frequently crashes and requires security updates almost weekly, so no one really uses or thinks about it.

Incidentally, if read through the Handbook you'll find that it contains a section on how to update local documentation, which will get you the absolute latest version of the Handbook. And as others have said, help maintaining the docs is always welcome. :)
 
Atsuri said:
Does anyone know of an initiative to update the FreeBSD Handbook and if not, do you [community] think it is needed?
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The Handbook and other documentation including books, articles, and man pages are continuously updated. Help is always needed.

Beastie7 said:
Good luck. The maintainers are reluctant to outside refinement from the community.
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What leads you to that conclusion?

drhowarddrfine said:
If I'm not mistaken, @wblock is one involved in the handbook, and other documentation, and will probably visit this thread at any moment.
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Yes. I'm a documentation committer and a member of the DocEng team.

As far as suggestions go, we really, really like the kind that say "Section X is wrong, here is a patch that fixes it." I am reluctant to create my own update for a section on something I don't use or can't test.

If you are interested in helping to update the documentation, the FreeBSD Documentation Project Primer is a book that tells (almost) all about it: https://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/fdp-primer/. If you have specific questions, please start a forum thread.
 
I greatly appreciate your feedback wblock@. I will get to it soon and see whether I have the necessary knowledge to improve our beloved Handbook in any way :). I will mark this thread as 'Solved' as I believe it has answered my inquiry.
 
Beastie7 said:
Good luck. The maintainers are reluctant to outside refinement from the community. ...
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I have a very different experience from that which you mention.

At one point I had suggestions for better wording and additional explanation points for a topic. I sent an outline sketch of what I thought was needed and suggestions for change to the email address for the Handbook.

Within a couple of days, the Handbook had been changed to incorporate my suggestions.


Honestly, I have trouble imagining any part of the FreeBSD project as being "reluctant to outside refinement from the community," as you assert.
 
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