Documentation!

Posted Mar 27, 2009 4:46 UTC (Fri) by rusty (guest, #26)
In reply to: Documentation! by nix
Parent article: Nftables: a new packet filtering engine

Actually, Alexey wrote excellent (if highly technical) documentation for the ip command. It's
called ip-cref.tex and it's in the source distribution of iproute2.

That said, I'd be happy to write a HOWTO for nftables, once it's ready for non-devs. Only takes
about a week to write a decent HOWTO.

to post comments

Documentation!

Posted Mar 27, 2009 6:26 UTC (Fri) by ras (subscriber, #33059) [Link]

Yes. He did. I have read it many a time, along with its companion ip-tunnels.tex. However iproute has two main commands: ip and tc. ip-cref.tex and ip-tunnels.txt only cover ip. I have no problem with either of them, other than perhaps him not providing them in the form of a man page.

But ip is a relatively simple command compared to tc, and all he provided for it was README.iproute2+tc. I guess without it, I would not have known the purpose of the tc command. For the rest I had to read the source.

> That said, I'd be happy to write a HOWTO for nftables

Bugger future messes these people might create, how about fixing the ones they have left behind? I wrote my own doco when I decided to use tc in anger: http://www.stuart.id.au/russell/files/tc/doc so I am not asking for someone to do something I haven't done myself. And before you ask the obvious question: after dealing with the kernel devs once, I think Conroy must be easier to deal with. Perhaps I exaggerate, but only by a tiny bit.

Documentation!

Posted Mar 27, 2009 18:09 UTC (Fri) by kaber (guest, #18366) [Link] (1 responses)

pdf and man-generation from docbook source are integrated and I even already wrote a few lines :) While I'm not good at writing HOWTO's, I intend to write command reference, syntax etc. documentation.

Documentation!

Posted Mar 27, 2009 23:52 UTC (Fri) by ras (subscriber, #33059) [Link]

This is great news.

Writing reference documentation (like a man page) is something programmers do well. Writing concise (as in contains few redundancies), complete and unambiguous explanations is what most programmers do naturally - and it normally comes easily to them regardless of the language - C or English. I suspect this is why the man page system is one of the best sources of documentation around. There are notable exceptions of course - like the sudo man page, but even that manages to be clearer than some ISO specs I have read.

HOWTO's and tutorials - well rusty seems to have a remarkable talent for it, but he is the exception rather than the rule. The best HOWTO's seem to come from the users.

I see below you are talking of adding nftables as a classifier. This is even better news. It is a way of evolving the mess we have now into something sane.

Documentation!

Posted Jun 4, 2014 19:49 UTC (Wed) by pgoetz (guest, #4931) [Link]

I'm trying to use nftables now ... in 2014. How about that HOWTO?