Re: RPM/YUM book and suggestions for the yum(8) man page

James Antill wrote:
> Andrew Ford <[email protected]> writes:
>
>   
>> On 10/07/11 20:24, Andrew Ford wrote:
>>     
>>> As I posted back in April, I am writing a book for O'Reilly on RPM
>>> and YUM.  The timescales have slipped somewhat due to the demands of
>>> the day job, but it is starting to come together.  Apologies to
>>> those who volunteered to review the book - I will have something to
>>> look at soon now.
>>>
>>> While trying to get my head around everything to do with yum I
>>> realized that the man page is rather indigestible.  It lists about
>>> 30 different commands in no discernible order.  One could organize
>>> the commands into three categories: (1) reporting (on packages,
>>> groups, repos and dependencies), (2) package installation, upgrade
>>> and removal, and (3) housekeeping and miscellaneous.  I would be
>>> happy to modify the man page if people would like to get an idea of
>>> how it might be restructured.
>>>       
>
>  That sounds pretty good, feel free to post any patches to the -devel
> mailing list :).
>
>   
I'll subscribe to that list and do so. 

It looks like after having used Perl for 23 years, writing the RPM/YUM 
book might be the trigger that causes me to learn Python!
>> I have put a formatted PDF of my modified version of the man page up at
>>
>>     https://portal.ford-mason.co.uk/yum.8-new.pdf
>>
>> All I have done is added sections to group the commands and moved text
>> around.
>>
>> Comments would be welcome.
>>     
>
>  The only thing is that the above is against a slightly older man page
> that the latest release (or HEAD). You probably want to do the change
> against the one in git, and then do git send-email on it.
>
>   
I noticed that - and have grabbed the latest tarball and diffed the 
yum.8 files in the two releases.  It won't take very much to apply the 
changes to the later release.

>  Also it might be useful to still have an index at the top, just
> listing each command one per. line.
>   
My feeling is that the index at the top doesn't add that much value.  If 
it is retained then it should be split in three with the headings used 
in the main body of the (revised) man page.
>  We also accept patches for the yum.conf man page :).
>
>   
Yes - I've been looking at that too!

BTW I noticed that some of the links on the wiki page 
http://yum.baseurl.org/wiki/releases  are wrong (some links go to the 
page for the wrong release)

Andrew

-- 
Andrew Ford
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