On Sun, Jul 14, 2019 at 04:49:40PM +0000, Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek wrote:
On Sat, Jul 13, 2019 at 04:19:02PM +0200, Georg Sauthoff wrote:
[..]
> See also its about page
https://manpath.be/about for some of
its
> features (e.g. permalinks, short links, reverse links ...).
Looks interesting. One thing that seems missing at first sight is
search: it'd be great to have interactive search across sections.
Right now, it's only easy to find a page is one knows the section
and the exact name.
Right now you can google search the site like this:
memory management site:manpath.be/f30
This turns up the malloc and fork man pages, for example.
I plan to add a search feature to the site. Probably first a search form
in the left column that redirects the query to a google search like in
the above example. In a second step perhaps I'll also add some internal
search functionality.
One issue that I had before with similar services was that it was
never possible to rely on any given one to provide _all_ man
pages. In systemd we link to man pages online from online versions
of our pages under
http://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/index.html,
and we have to link to a bunch of different services
(
man7.org,
linux.die.net,
mankier.com), because we need to link
to kernel man pages, and various fringe tools, some distro-specific
man pages, etc. Two suggestions: 1. pull pages from many different
My approach for Fedora/CentOS is to import all valid man pages from all
available packages (i.e. what is available if you just enable
the fedora/base + updates repositories).
Thus, with respect to Fedora/CentOS the man page repository should be
pretty complete.
I plan to add more distributions/versions in the future.
sources, 2. include a suggestion box for people to mention what
they can't find.
There is a suggestion feature when a requested page isn't found but is
available in another section. For example:
https://manpath.be/f30/2/popen
yields:
Page not found (404)
No such man page: popen(2)
Similar pages:
popen(3)
popen(3p)
(where the alternatives are linked)
If you navigate to a page that is available in a certain section but
also in others the right column lists the alternatives - in case one
wasn't aware of the alternatives - and/or used a suboptimal section.
Example:
https://manpath.be/f30/1/write
lists the alternatives: write(1p), write(2) and write(3p)
Best regards
Georg