UbuntuManpageRepository

Revision 2 as of 2008-06-06 18:29:47

Launchpad Entry: https://blueprints.edge.launchpad.net/ubuntu-doc/+spec/ubuntu-manpage-website
Created: 2008-06-06
Contributors: DustinKirkland
Packages affected:
See also: http://ubuntu.dustinkirkland.com/manpages

Summary

To create a set of scripts that can generate a complete repository of all manpages in Ubuntu distributions, marked up in an HTML format, indexed by Google, and hosted at http://manpages.ubuntu.com.

Rationale

The Ubuntu world is lacking a comprehensive website for browsing and searching all manpages in HTML markup. Other sites exist for other distributions, such as http://manpages.debian.net and http://www.linuxmanpages.com. But the Ubuntu distribution often contains different manpages, as the packages and versions differ from other distributions.

Several tools exist that can generate HTML from man's .tar.gz and groff formats. I have prototyped a shell script that will dig through a complete Ubuntu mirror, extracting manpages out of .deb's, converting them to HTML, and writing them to a <distro>/man<section>/<manpage>.html

Ubuntu Wiki