I’m gonna be honest, I use NixOS, but the docs fucking suck, and a number of things are just broken in nixpkgs. For instance, I recently discovered the structuredExtraConfig option for patching the kernel straight up does not work. This means you cannot unset any kernel options, which means some kernel patches won’t work unless you manually supply the entire kernel config.
EDIT: what’s even more annoying about it not working is that it fails to apply silently. In other words, your kernel tries to compile and then an hour later it fails because your config changes weren’t applied.
If you drive a car, have you read the entire owner’s manual for every car you’ve owned? If you’re a homeowner, how about your hvac system? What about your system shell? Your compiler(s)?
At some point you need your tools to be intuitive enough that you don’t need to read an entire manual in order to do your work.
I suspect this attitude of “read the fucken manuel” comes from when tooling was simpler and you could actually read all the manuals (or buy a book) to learn every small bit of it. Today, I’d be surprised if someone actually read all the Windows, .Net, and Powershell docs before attempting to write a small script.
Heck, even simpler things like Python have massive docs beneath every layer of them. You don’t learn everything from the ground up anymore, only the relevant parts to your use case.
Because reading the docs is too hard for an imbecile?
I’m gonna be honest, I use NixOS, but the docs fucking suck, and a number of things are just broken in nixpkgs. For instance, I recently discovered the
structuredExtraConfigoption for patching the kernel straight up does not work. This means you cannot unset any kernel options, which means some kernel patches won’t work unless you manually supply the entire kernel config.EDIT: what’s even more annoying about it not working is that it fails to apply silently. In other words, your kernel tries to compile and then an hour later it fails because your config changes weren’t applied.
If you drive a car, have you read the entire owner’s manual for every car you’ve owned? If you’re a homeowner, how about your hvac system? What about your system shell? Your compiler(s)?
At some point you need your tools to be intuitive enough that you don’t need to read an entire manual in order to do your work.
I suspect this attitude of “read the fucken manuel” comes from when tooling was simpler and you could actually read all the manuals (or buy a book) to learn every small bit of it. Today, I’d be surprised if someone actually read all the Windows, .Net, and Powershell docs before attempting to write a small script.
Heck, even simpler things like Python have massive docs beneath every layer of them. You don’t learn everything from the ground up anymore, only the relevant parts to your use case.
I cannot speak on behalf of the article author, but as someone who personally is an imbecile, the answer is: definitely!