[OpenIndiana-discuss] [oi-dev] [discuss] Making OI friendly to new users

[Andreas Wacknitz]

Am 17.08.25 um 22:38 schrieb Reginald Beardsley via openindiana-discuss:
>   
> A link to a decent pkg tutorial PDF would help. I plan to try building Octave again. It's got a ludicrously complex set of
We have a bunch of generated PDF files generated from the web pages; 
https://docs.openindiana.org is the entry point.
 From there it's easy to navigate to all kinds of documentation (online 
or pdf), eg.
https://docs.openindiana.org/pdf/dev/userland.pdf

And there are other interesting books listed on 
https://docs.openindiana.org/books/develop/

Andreas
> dependencies. Octave is the one thing I will use Linux for. Because it uses autotools it completely failed to build the last time I tried. *Supposedly* that's been fixed, but it's terminally braindead at birth. During the workstation wars there was some justification for Larry Wall's configure concept, but today's computing universe doesn't have 20 flavors of Unix.
>
> My S10_u8 instance has hundreds of things I compiled from scratch. At one time I maintained binaries for a huge amount of Gnu pre-autotools systems by knowing how to run Gnu make on all the systems, Intergraph Clix, AIX, SunOS, HP-UX, Ultrix and Irix. Autotools are the shell scripts from hell.
>
> Before autoconf there was imake which was truly the spawn of the devil. That was when X11 was not yet available on SunOS so I had to supply binaries for ARCO's research lab and any affiliate who needed them. IIRC I also did binaries for the Alliant i860 based "super" computer. Imake tried to run Makefiles though the C preprocessor instead of the Bourne shell. Only to discover that some systems would not let you do that. I simply ported gmake and was done. Once I'd done all the system flavors I simply included a hand built set of make definitions in an include file in the standard Makefiles using gmake. This was what I did while waiting for the system compiles for the work I was paid.
>
> Got a really nice email from an admin I knew. He'd been facing doing a huge system patch across the 6 OSes that I had built all the tools for. I had gotten a new contract and was no longer there.
>
> "I was facing a long evening installing patches, but Reg had been here and expect(1m) was everywhere. I was done in almost no time at all."
>
> I had to write the installer for an aggregate of 8 IIRC $100k/seat programs which ran a root and trashed each other. A worked, install B and it works, but A is broken. Reinstall A and B is broken. Now consider the fun when you get to system H. I had mentioned the problem at the end of a meeting once and was quite gob smacked when I was assigned to direct 2 full time employees to resolve the issue. The problem was doiing tap dances on the system configuration files. My install was a pair of tarballs which checked for conflicts and archived all the files I was fiddling with.
>
> "Install" saved the files and unpacked the tarballs. "Uninstall" removed them and restored the archived files. Total was about 100 lines of /bin/sh. Completely bulletproof.
>
> Have Fun!
> Reg
>
>
> On Sunday, August 17, 2025 at 10:50:08 AM CDT, Till Wegmüller <toasterson at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> Speaking of making OI more friendly for new users. what would
> incentivise people to make packages?
>
> -Till
>
>
> On 17.08.25 16:57, Reginald Beardsley via openindiana-discuss wrote:
>> Till,
>>
>> I just signed up as a $100/month sponsor.
>>
>> Kudos to whoever set up the donation link and including PayPal. That was an excellent experience.
>>
>>
>> Have Fun!
>> Reg
>>
>    
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