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Tuesday, October 7. 2008

Posted by Neil Williams in Debian

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It's really quite strange to come across a tool that is incredibly useful, does exactly what I need but of which I was completely unaware. This time it is manpages.debian.net - how long has this been around and why hasn't it been announced somewhere?
The best part is that if a manpage uses a See also section, the references to other manpages get turned into HTML links to the relevant manpage on the site.
Getting a manpage is now as simple as:

http://manpages.debian.net/cgi-bin/man.cgi?query=%s

which makes it trivial to put this onto the epiphany smart bookmark toolbar.
The site supports:

keyword search via apropos,
showing manpages from each distribution, default is Sid
rendering manpages in other formats like PDF
translated manpages, if the translation exists.
manpages via section

Thanks to Patrick Schoenfeld for inadvertently leading me to the site - I couldn't find who created the site so step up and be known.

Update

To those making comments on this entry, please note:
I have nothing directly to do with the site, I just found it and blogged about it so don't use my blog as a bug list. Ta. Such comments have been deleted and further comments are now disabled for this entry.

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I don't exactly know who runs or created manpages.debian.net, because it existed some time ago (created by Frank Lichtenheld), then disappeared and appeared again. I think it is now run by Javier Fernández-Sanguino Peña, because I found some posts from him, announcing this, back in 2007. Personally I'm pretty sure that I got attention on it by a blog post myself...

#1 Patrick Schoenfeld (Homepage) on 2008-10-07 10:39

if you go to the help page [0], you can see the copyright holders:
Copyright (c) 1996-2007 Wolfram Schneider
Copyright (c) 1993-1995 Berkeley Software Design, Inc.

[0]: http://manpages.debian.net/cgi-bin/man.cgi/help.html

#2 Loris on 2008-10-07 10:54

nion regularly exports the list of debian.net domains:

http://people.debian.org/~nion/net-domains.html

Owners can be looked up there

#3 foo on 2008-10-07 13:18

Another way to retrieve *.debian.net ownership information:

$ host -t TXT manpages.debian.net
manpages.debian.net descriptive text "Javier Pen~a "
manpages.debian.net descriptive text "PGP D6 91 BB 89 88 7A F7 A0 BA E4 27 FD 7A 6A FE DA"
manpages.debian.net descriptive text "PGP 86AA DB04 D2F5 CC55 3A4D 940F B1A9 DD82 DC81 4B09"

#4 Michael Schutte (Homepage) on 2008-10-07 14:28

Very nice; thanks for the pointer. It doesn't entirely hold up to stress-testing, though -- when file conflicts occur, only one of the conflicting pages is available AFAICT. (Yet another reason to keep them to a minimum, as we already rightly strive to do.)

#5 Aaron M. Ucko (Homepage) on 2008-10-07 18:16

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