Package: debian-goodies Version: 0.69 Severity: wishlist Tags: patch Hi!
We have been working hard on restoring the manpages.debian.org service in the last months. It's now reliable and complete, yet you need a web browser to use it. The neat thing is: manpages.debian.org also ships actual manpages, so it's possible to use it to get the actual manpage source and load it locally. This idea first came up over Ubuntu's side as the "dman" command. This command was never packaged - it is just available on the manpages.ubuntu.com webpage. Yet we want people to be able to use this directly right now. The proper way to ship software is, of course, to use Debian packages. Since this is just a small shell script, we didn't quite know where to put it. There's man-db, but that's rather a beastly thing and the proper thing to do there would be to just patch /usr/bin/man to check online if the requested manpage is missing locally. Unfortunately, man is written in C and that would mean a significant change in that venerable software - easier to just keep the shell script. I noticed debian-goodies was already shipping with similar tools: debman allows a user to browse manpages from an existing .deb or download the missing .deb if necessary. dman takes a similar approach, but offloads the extraction to the static manpages.debian.org mirror, saving a lot of time. It also avoids a lot of guessing, because the user doesn't need to know which package the manpage is in - the manpages.debian.org redirector does that for you. I've considered implementing this as an extension to debman, but it seemed a little clunky: the functionality is completely orthogonal and there is very little code reuse between the two programs, if maybe man -l. :) So I figured it made sense to keep the program separate. In time, maybe it can trickle down to Ubuntu and we can share a common codebase there as well. I have pushed my work in a feature branch on the git repository here: https://anonscm.debian.org/git/collab-maint/debian-goodies.git/log/?h=debiman-support I haven't merged this directly in master because, even though this is collab-maint, I didn't feel comfortable just doing a NMU of this thing without first consulting you. You can review the source code here: https://anonscm.debian.org/git/collab-maint/debian-goodies.git/tree/dman?h=debiman-support The associated issue in the debiman project, which runs manpages.debian.org, is here: https://github.com/Debian/debiman/issues/57 Thank you for your consideration! A. -- System Information: Debian Release: 9.0 APT prefers testing APT policy: (500, 'testing'), (1, 'unstable') Architecture: amd64 (x86_64) Foreign Architectures: armhf Kernel: Linux 4.9.0-2-amd64 (SMP w/4 CPU cores) Locale: LANG=fr_CA.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=fr_CA.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8) Shell: /bin/sh linked to /usr/bin/dash Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system) Versions of packages debian-goodies depends on: ii curl 7.52.1-4 ii dctrl-tools [grep-dctrl] 2.24-2+b1 ii dialog 1.3-20160828-2 ii perl 5.24.1-2 ii python3 3.5.3-1 ii whiptail 0.52.19-1+b1 Versions of packages debian-goodies recommends: ii lsof 4.89+dfsg-0.1 Versions of packages debian-goodies suggests: ii popularity-contest 1.64 ii xdg-utils 1.1.1-1 ii zenity 3.22.0-1+b1 -- no debconf information
