Daemon's Advocate article

[Michel Talon]

Hiten Pandya <hmp at xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in
news:40437607.9060807 at xxxxxxxxxxxxx: 

> Michel Talon wrote:
x
> 
>      Hmm, before this topic turns into a fountain of criticism, I
>      would like to say that Greg Lehey did contribute A WHOLE chapter
>      on Vinum for the FreeBSD Handbook from his `Complete FreeBSD'
>      book.  The documentation explains the underlying concepts of
>      Vinum pretty well and how to use it.
> 
>      How do I know this?  Well, because I and Greg Lehey worked on
>      this doc issue together.  The Vinum in 4.x is far better than
>      the one in 5.x, that is from personal experience with the
>      software.
> 
>

Hiten,

don't take this as personal criticism, but i consider that the vinum
documentation in the handbook is as bad as the rest and doesn't shed any 
more light on the way to use it, particularly in case of crash.
Precisely i wanted one day to experiment with vinum for fun  and falled
on this handbook chapter. It dissuaded me immediately to even try. It is
a *very* difficult job to explain clearly such complicated system. When
security is an issue, and it is particularly the case here, one cannot
afford to be allusive, to suppose that the reader will understand
unexplained concepts, or invent appropriate action in case of trouble.
Most necesary is an absolutely straightforward description of the
actions to take (and actions *not* to take) after a crash. If this was
really clearly stated, we would not have contemplated the dozens of
messages on mailing lists of people having  lost files. When proeminent
kernel hackers publicly complain on freebsd-current that they all tried
vinum and all lost files, you can consider there is a serious problem 
somewhere.