Re: Distribution security
- From: "David L. Mills" <mills@xxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 04 Dec 2007 12:54:35 +0000
Harlan,
What planet are you coming from? You know I violently disagree with you on the options thing and it has absolutely nothing to do with the html documentation. The options thing is overkill, an unnecessary complication and not really helpful in view of the available documentation. I would very much rather see the low-key help hints as in typical Unix commands.
Even so, as I told you, there can be serious disconnect between the options thing and the actual documentation, as evidence in the ntp-keygen program for example. I told you the coding style was intricate, unnecessarily complex and I would not deal with it.
Yes, I require that man pages not be in the base distribution; however, there is a html2man utility in the distribution that can produce a man page ripoff of the html pages, although with loss of content. Then, why is the sntp man page still in the distribution and what is worse, why is that man page installed by default? You did that over my objections and I consider that extremely rude.
Dave
Harlan Stenn wrote:
.In article <fj22v1$ee9$1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, "David L. Mills" <mills@xxxxxxxx> 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
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