Re: [ntp:questions] Distribution security
Jan, A thousand roses for saying that, in particular the point about having an audit trail. I've been burned many times about errors in document reformats that were either cached with errors or simple broken in translation. Dave Jan Ceuleers wrote: Harlan, Harlan Stenn wrote: Jan I really hate being sent from left to right in search of Jan documentation. This includes stub man pages pointing me at html or info Jan pages. Ideally I'd want to be able to select the documentation format Jan on a system I'm responsible for myself (i.e. as a policy decision on my Jan end). What you describe is my goal. I know and I thank you for it. My not-so-hidden agenda in writing the above message was to support you by showing that there is indeed demand for documentation on formats other than html, while ensuring consistency and an audit trail leading from the documentation in all formats to a single authoritative source. One obvious way progress toward this goal will be greatly improved will be for more people and institutions to join the NTP Forum. Please do what you can to get members to sign up for the forum - if you need more information to help make the decision please let me know. And if you decide not to join, it would also help to let me know why. Email is probably the best way to do these things. I have indeed sent you email about this. Happy to help you on this issue as well. Cheers, Jan ___ questions mailing list questions@lists.ntp.org https://lists.ntp.org/mailman/listinfo/questions
Re: [ntp:questions] Distribution security
Harlan, Harlan Stenn wrote: Jan I really hate being sent from left to right in search of Jan documentation. This includes stub man pages pointing me at html or info Jan pages. Ideally I'd want to be able to select the documentation format Jan on a system I'm responsible for myself (i.e. as a policy decision on my Jan end). What you describe is my goal. I know and I thank you for it. My not-so-hidden agenda in writing the above message was to support you by showing that there is indeed demand for documentation on formats other than html, while ensuring consistency and an audit trail leading from the documentation in all formats to a single authoritative source. One obvious way progress toward this goal will be greatly improved will be for more people and institutions to join the NTP Forum. Please do what you can to get members to sign up for the forum - if you need more information to help make the decision please let me know. And if you decide not to join, it would also help to let me know why. Email is probably the best way to do these things. I have indeed sent you email about this. Happy to help you on this issue as well. Cheers, Jan ___ questions mailing list questions@lists.ntp.org https://lists.ntp.org/mailman/listinfo/questions
Re: [ntp:questions] Distribution security
In article [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Hal Murray) writes: When I wrote that I was unaware of the html page. I'm a Unix guy and I generally don't even consider looking for html docs - I am used to (and expect) man pages. Hal Me too. Me too. Many other folks agree as well. Hal Would it help to ship dummy man pages that just pointed to the html Hal documentation? Please see: http://support.ntp.org/bin/view/Dev/GNUAutoGenConversion http://members.ntpforum.isc.org/bin/view/Main/ForumProject3 http://members.ntpforum.isc.org/bin/view/Main/ForumProject4 and it might be pretty easy for somebody to put the URLs in the various .def files to get the interim step Hal describes out there sooner. I'd be real happy if somebody did this, as I'm gonna be crushed for time for the next few months' time. -- Harlan Stenn [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://ntpforum.isc.org - be a member! ___ questions mailing list questions@lists.ntp.org https://lists.ntp.org/mailman/listinfo/questions
Re: [ntp:questions] Distribution security
Hal Murray wrote: When I wrote that I was unaware of the html page. I'm a Unix guy and I generally don't even consider looking for html docs - I am used to (and expect) man pages. Me too. Would it help to ship dummy man pages that just pointed to the html documentation? Can I just get my vote in (even though my non-membership of the ntpd development community puts me into the whiner-not-worker category)? I really hate being sent from left to right in search of documentation. This includes stub man pages pointing me at html or info pages. Ideally I'd want to be able to select the documentation format on a system I'm responsible for myself (i.e. as a policy decision on my end). This issue also goes beyond the mere format of the documentation, even in case I am forced to accept multiple document formats. Searching the documentation installed on a system gets more difficult in this case. For example, the apropos tool won't search anything but man pages. Cheers, Jan ___ questions mailing list questions@lists.ntp.org https://lists.ntp.org/mailman/listinfo/questions
Re: [ntp:questions] Distribution security
In article [EMAIL PROTECTED], Jan Ceuleers [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: Jan I really hate being sent from left to right in search of Jan documentation. This includes stub man pages pointing me at html or info Jan pages. Ideally I'd want to be able to select the documentation format Jan on a system I'm responsible for myself (i.e. as a policy decision on my Jan end). What you describe is my goal. One obvious way progress toward this goal will be greatly improved will be for more people and institutions to join the NTP Forum. Please do what you can to get members to sign up for the forum - if you need more information to help make the decision please let me know. And if you decide not to join, it would also help to let me know why. Email is probably the best way to do these things. Jan This issue also goes beyond the mere format of the documentation, even Jan in case I am forced to accept multiple document formats. Searching the Jan documentation installed on a system gets more difficult in this Jan case. For example, the apropos tool won't search anything but man Jan pages. One of the items on the TODO queue for support.ntp.org is to have searchable versions of each released version of NTP on the site. As for your apropos won't search anything but man pages complaint, the AutoGen documentation effort would have the same content appear in various formats, so at least for the common documentation (ie, whatever is not maintained by Dave), the content of the ntpd or ntp.conf documentation (for example) would be the same on the html, man, info, etc. pages. -- Harlan Stenn [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://ntpforum.isc.org - be a member! ___ questions mailing list questions@lists.ntp.org https://lists.ntp.org/mailman/listinfo/questions
Re: [ntp:questions] Distribution security
In article [EMAIL PROTECTED], Harlan Stenn [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: Harlan Please see: Harlan http://support.ntp.org/bin/view/Dev/GNUAutoGenConversion Harlan http://members.ntpforum.isc.org/bin/view/Main/ForumProject3 Harlan http://members.ntpforum.isc.org/bin/view/Main/ForumProject4 My bad - those links should be: http://support.ntp.org/bin/view/Dev/GNUAutoGenConversion http://ntpforum.isc.org/bin/view/Main/ForumProject3 http://ntpforum.isc.org/bin/view/Main/ForumProject4 -- Harlan Stenn [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://ntpforum.isc.org - be a member! ___ questions mailing list questions@lists.ntp.org https://lists.ntp.org/mailman/listinfo/questions
Re: [ntp:questions] Distribution security
When I wrote that I was unaware of the html page. I'm a Unix guy and I generally don't even consider looking for html docs - I am used to (and expect) man pages. Me too. Would it help to ship dummy man pages that just pointed to the html documentation? -- These are my opinions, not necessarily my employer's. I hate spam. ___ questions mailing list questions@lists.ntp.org https://lists.ntp.org/mailman/listinfo/questions
Re: [ntp:questions] Distribution security
Harlan, I don't want to pick a fight on this, but you told me offline that the html2man utility was imperfect and not appropriate to convert bulk NTP html pages to man pages. So, why is that utlity still in the distribution? It may yet be useful in many cases, but there needs to be a statement to that effect. Also reported offline, there is in fact an html page on the sntp progam, so the sntp man page is superfluous, especially if installed by default. I don't promote this as specific to UDel, but applicable everywhere. The sntp program included in the distribution itself has serious hazards and can be badly misused if certain program options are are enabled. The html page is carefully structured to avoid these hazards. In any case, the sntp program should be bansihed to a separate but supported distribution. On the options thing, whatever intricate facility you have installed creates four new files for each program. I tried to find what option letter coresponded to what obscure define in the ntp-keygen.c program and could not discover it. As result, the html documentation and the options list decodes are probably discordant. As I said many times, the official documentation should be in one place only and can be updated as necessary without creating little discords elsewhere. On the other hand, I have no objection and do encourage useful help as in the standard Unix command usage decodes. Dave Harlan Stenn wrote: Folks, I have privately followed up with Dave on his response. Anybody with a threaded newsreader (or access to one) should be easily able to find it, if they care that much. H ___ questions mailing list questions@lists.ntp.org https://lists.ntp.org/mailman/listinfo/questions
Re: [ntp:questions] Distribution security
In article [EMAIL PROTECTED], David L. Mills [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: David In fact, all snapshots, releases, bugzilla, repositories, NTP home David page and NTP project site physically reside at U Delaware. Only the David documents maintained by the NTP Support Project are physically David resident elsewhere at ISC. The intent is that, if you get something David from U Delaware or ISC, it is authentic, official and neither David modified nor infested with trojan horses. I'll add that I generate md5 signatures at UDel when a tarball is rolled, and we are working on a way to pgp/gpg/crypto sign these tarballs as well. David Folks should understand ... David ... The documentation included in a particular distribution David applies only to that distribution and may be different in minor ways David from another distribution. David ... Understand David that the up-to-minute revision is on the web at www.ntp.org, so they David may differ in small part from whatever distribution is in use. And one of the items on the Support Project's TODO list is to have web-searchable online documentation for a number of different versions of NTP, so folks can find the information they want more easily. David That was easy, now the hard part... David Now the ugly part. It's hard enough to deal with clones of old html David pages, but some folks insist on man pages that are not in the David official documentation that leaves U Delaware. The reasons for this David are many, including the loss of web typography, diagrams and David content. However, some folks use tools to convert html format to man David format, even if that loses content. I have no quarrel with that as David long as it is not claimed to be official and a disclaimer is added to David that effect. Not so fast, Dave. While this *may* be true for some folks, I know of two exceptions. The first is the FreeBSD stuff, where they took your html/ pages and converted them in to man pages, because the documentation in FreeBSD is man-page based. The second is the official distribution. While your html/ pages are still your definitive pages, I have, after discussion and agreement with you, begun the process of converting from our old way of parsing command-line options and flags to AutoOpts. This has bought us at least 2 big overall improvements. First, our options processing is now much easier. Second, the AutoOpts tools can spit out documentation that is based (in part) on the actual command-line processing specification. On our agreed-upon agenda, this will be the new way we handle program documentation, because it will allow people to install the documentation in a variety of formats that are useful to them. This will include html, man, info, and some other formats. You have said you do not want the man pages installed at UDel, and I have not yet had the time to code that in to the Makefiles (I'm a busy guy and there have been bigger fish to fry). David To see how far the practice goes, I googled for ntp-keygen man and David got 623 hits(!). A casual check suggests that most of them are for David reformated html pages, some really old, some incomplete and some David modified with errors. Users of systems like Linux that may David extensively clone and convert pages from older releases may not apply David to later releases and especially snapshots. Yes, but the good news is that anybody who tries to do this should quickly realize that the version of the documentation they are looking at most likely does not match the version they are running. H -- http://ntpforum.isc.org - be a member! ___ questions mailing list questions@lists.ntp.org https://lists.ntp.org/mailman/listinfo/questions
