On Tue, Oct 28, 2008 at 03:37:12PM -0400, Heimdall Imbert wrote: > I understand what you mean.
No, it seems from your response that you do not. The mailing lists are at best secondary sources, for particular and possibly unusual difficulties that you cannot resolve by reading the primary sources, which are the man pages and the FAQ (and of course README and INSTALL.* files and such), and sometimes the documents referenced therein. Following the mailing lists may be counterproductive when you are first learning, because you run the risk of being distracted by shiny trinkets and looking too much at what other people are doing instead of really trying to understand things for yourself, first hand. There is always time later for shiny trinkets. I suppose a kind of warm social feeling might accompany following the mailing lists, and perhaps nobody should knock that; but you should bear in mind that, in terms of information, a lot of what you will see is superfluous, things that people could know or find out for themselves, if they'd just be bothered. (This message is a case in point.) One thing at a time, decide what you want to learn how to do. Be modest in your goals, and read the relevant man pages slowly and carefully. Unless you are already very comfortable with the system, trying to get information by skimming quickly lots of man pages is like trying to pick fly shit from pepper with boxing gloves. It may even be true that time spent reading carefully the man pages for the commands you see when you type 'ls /bin' or 'ls /usr/bin', even in alphabetical order, will in the not too long run give you a better sense of the system than skimming lots of messages on misc@ that you are unprepared to follow. This is not to say that misc@ cannot be a great resource for certain purposes (and marc.info is great for searching misc@, among others). Here's a very inspiring message sent last year by Ted Unangst. http://marc.info/?l=openbsd-misc&m=118133997408229 cheers, -wb
