[opensuse] Commands and Documentation (was: A request to Attachmate/Novell

Linux Tyro said the following on 12/14/2011 09:46 AM:

On Wed, Dec 14, 2011 at 6:31 AM, Bob Williams wrote:

...

http://doc.opensuse.org/products/opensuse/openSUSE_114/opensuse-reference/ch...

But that article is for 11.4 suse, all commands equally work with 12.1 openSUSE also?

I should think that for all except the distribution-specific commands, thinks like zypper, yum, apt-get, the command documentation you referred to about ubuntu would apply. After all, the distributions are about packaging and added value, not about core functionality. I run, have run for a long while, openSuse, Mandriva and Fedora. Apart from those distribution-specific commands the only differences I'm seeing between them is different revisions of a few things like Samba, Dovecot and the like. Dovecot, for example, has just had a new release this month, and there is a radical difference between the way the config files are structured in the release 1.2 that I'm running on my mandriva mail hub and the current 2.x series. Nothing new here: the same applies with major revisions in many other packages. But the core functionality stays the same. And yes, many shell scripts from the pre-BASH days will still run fine under modern bash. That being said, when new things come out, there is always a lag. Many of the things we're used to with Linux that we've "inherited" function and form from the old UNIX days are very well documented. For example, the 'sysvinit' that is currently being replaced by SystemD came out at the beginning of the 1980s when the Unix Systems Group at Bell released SYSIII. And oh boy did it cause uproar! many loved it, many hated the 'straight-jacket and stratification' that it represented. And there was very little documentation and how-to for it. Just the examples USG had supplied and the sparse, unhelpful man pages. In fact USG had in some places removed shell scripts and replaced them with compiled code! Shock-Horror! It means there were fewer examples of shell scripts to learn from. Three decades on we have plenty of documentation and examples and consider it the norm. (Unless you use a BSD-type system). Yes, its the beginning of the learning curve, and the best we can do is discuss and identify the issues and shortcomings and write blog entries, wiki entries and how-to, and build up the available knowledge base. That will help those who can google. -- To do anything in this world worth doing, we must not stand back shivering and thinking of the cold and danger, but jump in, and scramble through as well as we can. Sydney Smith -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org