Software Management Tutorial

Fri Nov 19 02:27:49 UTC 2004

Hi

> The general advice is actually to avoid screenshots
> wherever possible. 
> I think that this may be to reduce maintenance.  The
> Installation Guide
> is exceptional, AFAIK.

in general we should favor end users over maintainers.
can fedora docs teamt reconsider this advice. while it
might be true for previous redhat or current redhat el
releases, fedora aims are different and we should be
more accomodating.

> 
> Good point - I've added the warning.  What extra
> explanation do you feel
> is needed for yum remove ?

well yum remove as is the same for other operations
asks for confirmation before doing removing the
packages. Also unlike rpm -e, it can reverse resolve
dependencies. You should be providing working examples
of every command rather than simply stating them.  add
a note somewhere to refer to man pages and yum -h for
more options and help

> At the moment I need to check the text against the
> final release of FC3,
> integrate the screenshots provided by Colin Charles
> and    tidy up
> various other bits before doing another build. 
> After that, the sections
> relating to partitioning and RAID are probably the
> most critical missing
> pieces.

I suggest you present the installation guide to the
users mailing list with a warning that its in a draft
stage and collect all feedback from the huge amount of
newbies there. This will get you much better
understanding of what users want from a guide like
this . I suspect most of us in the docs have enough
experience with this to actually put ourselves in a
newbie perspective

> 
> I had to revise all my yum notes for FC3 final, so I
> thought that I'd
> put some more effort in and try to produce a proper
> guide.  Hopefully
> this is now complete.

its a great start but probably requires a couple of
revisions. a few more points

Have a section to explain how to get rid of the alerts
icon. Its a memory hog currently and is one of the
FAQ's

the section on  managing up2date channels should
mention that up2date can *use* both apt and yum
repositories but not act as a general frontend for
either of these commands

7. Authorizing Package Sources

This section might have a few references to explain
what gpg is(gnupg is the actual package) and also a
warning against disabling gpg keys while letting the
users know that there is a option to do so.

"8.1. Automatic Updates"

" There is no separate yum service. The command given
above enables the yum control script in
/etc/rc.d/init.d/. This control script activates the
script /etc/cron.daily/yum.cron, so that the cron
service will perform the system update as part of it's
daily schedule."

users typically dont care how this works. if you need
to explain this please do so as note. the dummies
series of book does this well. it has humour titles
like "techno whizbang" or something like that which
clearly gets the point across that this is not a
required reading. You might want to add that cron is a
task scheduler for Linux

"yum provides MTA"

this is actually a meta package and probably requires
a explanation as note

" The Website for the official Fedora Extras
repositories is here:

http://www.fedora.us/ "

this is actually a temporary status(hopefully). You
might want to link to
http://fedora.redhat.com/participate/terminology.html

"12. Adding Repositories as Package Sources"

It would be useful to add that  one of the advantages
of the new format is that a new repository can be
added as a rpm package. for example freshrpms does
this. Also try adding a warning that users shouldnt
mix random repositories together

freshrpms and dags are not compatible with fedora.us
and livna (I am not very sure of the exact details)

" Do not use the options to override this dependency
checking. Instead, use yum to find and install the
packages needed to meet the dependency requirements."

do not use the options to override dependancies unless
you are an expert. Use yum or download the required
packages manually. use rpmfind.net to find the package
having the required dependancy if a package is not
explicitly suggested

"You will need to install the Development Tools group
of packages on your system in order to compile
software from source code."

you might explain yum groupinstall and how to use the
cds here. the warning can also add the information
that    compiling software from random untrusted
sources are potentialy dangerous

reminder: for more details users should read the man
pages and do explain every command with live examples

Try presenting the result to users list for more
feedback

note: 

This feedback might sound critical but I have been
doing such tech reviews for LDP for sometime and its a
good document regardless of this. Congrats

regards
Rahul Sundaram

=====
Regards
Rahul Sundaram

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