Bug#264589: www.debian.org: Online manpages, preferably linked by package?
On Thu, Aug 26, 2004 at 12:35:34PM +0200, Javier Fernández-Sanguino Peña wrote:
> I agree, this is definitely something we need to implement since it has
> been a longstanding issue. Many other distributions/OS provide online
> manpages and those are a valuable thing, it should be possible to automate
> extraction of manpages from binary packages, drop them in a per-package
> hierarchy (to avoid conflicts) and generate browseable index (and
> searchable index) for them. It's just a matter of dedicating some time to
> write the appropiate code, write it, and run it over a mirror copy with the
> output available in, for example, www.debian.org/doc/manpages/
I have played around a bit with the idea. Some preliminary results I put
up at http://manpages.debian.net/ . Just very basic stuff so far. You
can search for the exact name of a man page or package and read them
in HTML, plain text and roff source. And there is a index available,
sorted by man page names.
Some limitations of this early version:
- No real search engine yet, therefor currently no apropos or
full text search.
- Doesn't handle links (symbolic and .so) at all yet
- My local mirror only has i386 and all, so no man pages from other
architectures, yet.
- No page layout, just enough HTML display the information
- Man page conversion to HTML is done with man2html (available
as Debian package), I already found some annoying bugs, e.g. in
the link identifying heuristics.
- More static indices to come.
Comments welcome.
(P.S.: The man pages can also be browsed in a (very deep) directory
structure, http://manpages.debian.net/manpages/, main and contrib
contain links to the real files in pool which are hashed by their
md5sum)
Gruesse,
--
Frank Lichtenheld <djpig@debian.org>
www: http://www.djpig.de/
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