On Mon, 10 Apr 2017 17:10:55 -0500
Adam Thompson <athom...@athompso.net> wrote:
> You've asked almost the same question as "why does anyone need
> tutorials? just read the man pages!" just at the next level up. The
> answer is because the man pages aren't adequate to cover every
> scenario, and not everyone can read man pages effectively. People
> have different learning styles, if nothing else. I learn best by
> seeing examples and asking questions. (In fact, the lack of good
> examples is a pet peeve of mine with the OpenBSD man pages, but
> that's another story.)
Another issue with the man pages is that there is extremely limited
indexing. I have often had to google or find tutorials, only to find
there's this "new" device or program I never heard of.
$ apropos -i EXDEV
apropos: nothing appropriate
$ man errno | grep -i EXDEV
18 EXDEV Cross-device link. A hard link to a file on another file system
$
Either I am doing something wrong here, or the indexing is junk.
>
> I've attended Peter's seminar two?, maybe three? times now, and got
> something new out of it each time - some nuance that wasn't obvious
> just from reading pf.conf(5). Sometimes it was something Peter said,
> sometimes it was something another attendee said. That's the value
> of attending any training class or seminar, not just this one for PF.
>
> The tutorial is aimed not at people who would go and produce another
> tutorial, but at ordinary system administrators who don't have time
> to pore over the entire manpage, who want the most relevant
> information to them distilled and delivered efficiently.
>
> Plus, this year it appears that Peter is co-delivering the seminar
> with Massimiliano Stucchi from RIPE, so it will presumably cover a
> lot of IPv6 topics as well, which are poorly represented in existing
> materials and yet increasingly relevant.
And for those of us who cannot attend, hopefully it will be on video.
>
> Disclaimer: I now help organize (one small) part of BSDCan & PgCon,
> so I'm not *entirely* unbiased, but this is pretty much what I would
> have said the first two years I attended, anyway.
>
> -Adam
