Aye,
it seems I missed the part of this thread where you got flamed, and
couldn't find anything in the archive either. However:
On Wed, Apr 24, 2002 at 09:17:46AM -0500, Ron Goral wrote:
.... snippage ...
> Yes, I can read the perldocs and the manpages, but, incredibly, these are
> written with the notion that I have a half a clue about how to interpret
> what "chmod" means. And yes, yes, yes, reading more and more documents
> means that eventually, you will come to understand a word or two here or
> there. However, the plain and simple fact is that until there is a document
> written that assumes the reader knows NOTHING AT ALL about the *NIX
> environment ...
Let me start with: Flaming a post that shows missing understanding of
Unix file permissions is inappropriate and doesn't do this list any
good.
And: Yepp, you're right. Perl itself was written to solve specific
problems, and these *were* problems exclusively in the host and Unix
environment. Times have changed a bit and to find the balance between
explaining to the non-unix people the business of our (Unix folks) daily
life and make the documentation short and to the point on one hand, on
the other explanatory enough so you guys know what this stuff is all
about is not easy.
Unix file permissions are - except for the concept of the directory
hierarchy - about the first things you learn when starting with unix, so
for some people it's hard to understand if anybody has a problem with
this. *Many*, many of the functions you find when using 'perldoc' come
directly from the underlying C-library that's more or less common to all
Unix systems, and that's documented in the man pages.
So the question here is if it's perls job to explain these concepts.
I don't think so.
Perl should come with perl documentation and leave the system specific
part to specialized documentation.
ActiveState's perldocs that explain perl's connection to the Win32 API
don't explain the underlying concepts either.
These things should be explained in the system documentation - and the
average Linux distro e.g. comes with a truckload full of documentation
in that area. That's btw. the Unix way to do things: One program for
one job, but that one should be highly efficient.
However, an appropriate answer on *this* *list* should have been a
pointer to at least one or two introductory Unix books and perhaps some
webpages (and although I dare to post this long rand I'm actually not
able to provide you with any one, since I never read one %-)
It's always hard to bootstrap oneself on a new platform, to get a grip
on the system and a feeling for where to look for more information...
Keep going, and keep on posting stuff here, you'll see, it'll get
better, and you most probably wont get flamed by a kid with too much
thestosterone everyday...
--
If we fail, we will lose the war.
Michael Lamertz | +49 221 445420 / +49 171 6900 310
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