r9217 - /man-cgi/README.txt
Author: jfs
Date: Mon Jun 11 16:43:26 2012
New Revision: 9217
URL: http://svn.debian.org/wsvn/?sc=1&rev=9217
Log:
Describe the manpages.debian.net service, based on the information sent to http://lists.debian.org/debian-services-admin/2011/08/msg00003.html
Added:
man-cgi/README.txt
Added: man-cgi/README.txt
URL: http://svn.debian.org/wsvn/man-cgi/README.txt?rev=9217&op=file
==============================================================================
--- man-cgi/README.txt (added)
+++ man-cgi/README.txt Mon Jun 11 16:43:26 2012
@@ -1,0 +1,62 @@
+
+
+Information about manpages.debian.net
+-------------------------------------
+
+manpages.debian.net provides a public man-cgi interface for Debian.
+
+A Man-CGI interfaces is a simple web interface that allows the user to search
+for the manpages for an operating system either using 'exact' lookups or doing
+searches within the text (an 'apropos' search) and provides it in "pretty"
+HTML form to the user. The service was created to solve #264589
+('www.debian.org: Online manpages, preferably linked by package?').
+
+The Debian manpage interface currently allows users to search by name,
+Debian distribution (from lenny to experimental) and section. It provides
+manpages in both the original (english) language as well as
+internationalized, if available. It does not (yet) provide a way to search by
+package names.
+
+The man-cgi interface used by manpages.debian.net is derived from the
+interface used by FreeBSD [2] and developed by Wolfram Schneider. All the
+source code for the service, including the man-cgi program but also
+documentation, an installation "step-by-step" as well as sample configuration
+files for common web servers is available at the SVN repository of the Debian
+Documentation Project at
+http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/ddp/man-cgi/
+
+The service has been running since August 2007. It used to run in an official
+mirror (in Spain) but since the server had issues [3] in the past (disk
+failure) it was moved (may 2010) to paganini.debian.org and has been running
+there since.
+
+The number of end-users accesing this interface has not been fully
+investigated. Based on the web stats, the site receives ~5.000 to ~10.000
+unique visitors monthly (average of ~200 daily views).
+
+Although wiki.debian.org points to it (and most of the access to the
+interface seems to come from there), the longstanding issue #264589 is
+still open since the main site does not (and has since been changed to ask
+'packages.debian.org' to point to the manpages).
+
+Other long-standing issues with this service are:
+
+- Make it an official service (i.e. 's/net$/org/')
+- Improve the search service to make it possible to search by package
+- Fix the code that extracts the manpages to make it possible to serve
+ manpages of packages that provide the same files (i.e. they Conflict:
+ because the programs have the same names)
+
+This and other issues people could help with are described in the TODO file
+[4]
+
+Best regards,
+
+
+Javier Fernandez-Sanguino
+
+
+[1] http://lists.debian.org/debian-services-admin/2011/08/msg00001.html
+[2] http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi
+[3] http://lists.debian.org/debian-doc/2009/06/msg00022.html
+[4] http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/ddp/man-cgi/TODO?view=log
Reply to: