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New manpages CGI interface available (beta test)



Hi,

One of our longstanding TODOs is a CGI interface to all the manual pages in
our distribution. There used to exist manpages.debian.net but it is no longer
available.

After hacking around at FreeBSD's man CGI interface I've been able to come up
with this:
http://www.debian.org.es/cgi-bin/man.cgi
Source of the script at
http://www.debian.org.es/cgi-bin/man.cgi/source

The script uses a local manpage directory extracted from a local mirror.
Right now it is generating it, so if you try to use it as soon as you see
this mail you will find it does not contain too many manpages.
In any case I'll post more information on its size tomorrow (once its
finished)

Some TODOs:

- The interface does not currently support l10n/i18n, the text is hardcoded
  in the script

- It does not support looking for translated manpages nor offer to the user
  the available translations. I believe it could be easily extended to do so
  (they are available, but just not used). Would be nice to do so based on
  the browser's Content-Negotiation headers, even.

- It uses man directly to generate the manpages but they are not that pretty
  in HTML format. There are better formatters like the ones used by manServer
  [1] which could be used instead.

And probably others people will come up with...

Hope you enjoy it.

Javier

PS: No, it does not use MOLE, it uses yet another mirror archive iterator
written by yours truly...

[1] http://www.squarebox.co.uk/users/rolf/download/manServer.shtml

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