Manned.org: Online manual pages for Arch (...and some other systems)

yorhel · 2012-07-19 11:13:42

Hello fellow Archers!

I was fed up with the existing online manual page websites: Often they don't have the manuals of the software I use, have the manual of some terribly outdated version, or are simply formatted in an unreadable way.

So I decided to roll my own site and called it manned.org.
It currently indexes all man pages found in Arch core, extra and community and some mans from (both stable and historical) Debian and Ubuntu releases.

When a package is updated in the Arch repos, the manuals found in the old package will not be replaced. Instead, they will remain in the database, and remain available for viewing. I've only started indexing last month so there's not a whole lot of history yet, but the result is nonetheless quite useful. You can see, for example, that the italian translation of awesome was added in 3.4.12-1.

I've already been using the site for a while, and I hope it will be just as useful to you now that it's online. :-)

Homepage: http://manned.org/
About: http://manned.org/info/about
Arch package browser: http://manned.org/browse/arch

Last edited by yorhel (2012-08-17 11:07:01)

bohoomil · 2012-07-19 12:05:57

Plenty of useful work: thank you very much.

x33a · 2012-07-19 14:44:41

Looks pretty good. Thanks.

progandy · 2012-07-19 15:13:21

This is great. Finally a single source for online manpages, I don't have to use google anymore.

dodo3773 · 2012-07-19 16:14:29

Awesome. Very fast too. Now all we need is a cli application to fetch and read these (the ones that aren't included in Arch). Thanks. Very cool.

yorhel · 2012-08-15 16:42:49

Thanks for the positive replies. :-)

I've added FreeBSD to the index and open-sourced the site while I was at it. The git repo can be found at http://g.blicky.net/manned.git/, or if you prefer github: https://github.com/yorhel/manned

ANOKNUSA · 2012-08-15 17:08:22

This is kind of neat, but just to satisfy my curiosity, would you mind giving more info on what the goals of your site are, and how that site differs from the ones already available? All of the projects you have listed already have their own online man page and package databases, so the site just seems superfluous, and if those sites are lacking in up-to-date documentation it seems far more productive to just donate your time to those projects than start yet another one.

yorhel · 2012-08-15 17:27:39

ANOKNUSA wrote:

would you mind giving more info on what the goals of your site are, and how that site differs from the ones already available?

From what I've looked, the only other site designed to handle man pages for a variety of different systems is the one at freebsd.org. I've only quickly glanced at its source (yay open source), but its architecture is really based on the idea of providing a web front-end to the 'man' command. Contributing up-to-date Arch manuals shouldn't be very hard for that site, but having the site tell you from which package(s) a man page is from, or providing multiple alternative versions of a man page (package versions, translations) would be a lot harder. man(1) doesn't help you with that, so you have to create your own index and implement stuff yourself.

Then there's http://linuxmanpages.net/ and http://manpages.ubuntu.com/, which appear to be sharing the same code. They do index mans from multiple versions of a system, but their architecture is not suited for handling multiple versions of a package, and providing a nice version selection doesn't seem very easy. Also, considering there's two of those sites, I'm sure that something similar for Arch would have been implemented as another site sharing the same code.

And, yeah, coding a system from scratch is always more fun than expanding something that already exists. :-)

x33a · 2012-08-15 17:58:08

offtopic

@ yorhel, i didn't know you created ncdu. Thanks a lot for the best space recovery tool out there

0mark · 2012-08-17 09:01:22

Awesome! If you dont mind feature requests, it would be great to have links to the distributions package site where the man page is from. Well, a link to the projects website would also be cool, but i guess that one could be quite tricky

yorhel · 2012-08-17 11:06:47

x33a wrote:

@ yorhel, i didn't know you created ncdu. Thanks a lot for the best space recovery tool out there

Glad you like it. :-)

0mark wrote:

If you dont mind feature requests, it would be great to have links to the distributions package site where the man page is from. Well, a link to the projects website would also be cool, but i guess that one could be quite tricky

Unfortunately, there's no large central and open database with package information for various systems, so fetching metadata is going to require some effort. A link to the distributions package site should be a lot easier, I'll add those in a bit for systems that have such a site available. That is, for Arch and recent Debian/Ubuntu releases. Older Debian/Ubuntu releases don't have an online package index anymore (as far as I am aware), and FreeBSD doesn't really have something like that either. Well, there's FreshPorts.org, but I'm unsure how exactly packages and ports are linked.

Also, it's possible that I have an Arch package indexed that has since been renamed/removed from Arch, so a few 404's may pop up. I don't think this is a large issue, though. At least not yet at this point.

0mark · 2012-08-17 11:28:25

yorhel wrote:

Unfortunately, there's no large central and open database with package information for various systems, so fetching metadata is going to require some effort.

Yep, i thought so. At least arch linux has a "upstream url" field in most (or all) packages wich could be fetched. But that might a bit to much

yorhel wrote:

A link to the distributions package site should be a lot easier, I'll add those in a bit for systems that have such a site available.

Yay, cool, thanks

yorhel · 2012-08-17 11:37:28

0mark wrote:

yorhel wrote:
A link to the distributions package site should be a lot easier, I'll add those in a bit for systems that have such a site available.
Yay, cool, thanks

Done.

Last edited by yorhel (2012-08-17 11:37:40)

0mark · 2012-08-17 11:52:39

yorhel wrote:

Done.

I would like to say "brilliant", but as that is officially catchphrased, i just say "thanks"

progandy · 2012-08-17 11:55:15

I found a small bug: The package overview for FreeBSD's core-base lists a manpage for [, but it won't display.
http://manned.org/browse/freebsd-9.0/co … 2012-01-12
http://manned.org/%5B/f1397ef4

yorhel · 2012-08-17 12:11:57

progandy wrote:

I found a small bug: The package overview for FreeBSD's core-base lists a manpage for [, but it won't display.
http://manned.org/browse/freebsd-9.0/co … 2012-01-12
http://manned.org/%5B/f1397ef4

Thanks for reporting. It seems like Firefox escapes the [ and ] characters in URLs, while Opera and luakit don't. I've special-cased those characters so both "http://manned.org/%5B/f1397ef4" and "http://manned.org/[/f1397ef4" will work.

Arch Linux

#1 2012-07-19 11:13:42

Manned.org: Online manual pages for Arch (...and some other systems)

#2 2012-07-19 12:05:57

Re: Manned.org: Online manual pages for Arch (...and some other systems)

#3 2012-07-19 14:44:41

Re: Manned.org: Online manual pages for Arch (...and some other systems)

#4 2012-07-19 15:13:21

Re: Manned.org: Online manual pages for Arch (...and some other systems)

#5 2012-07-19 16:14:29

Re: Manned.org: Online manual pages for Arch (...and some other systems)

#6 2012-08-15 16:42:49

Re: Manned.org: Online manual pages for Arch (...and some other systems)

#7 2012-08-15 17:08:22

Re: Manned.org: Online manual pages for Arch (...and some other systems)

#8 2012-08-15 17:27:39

Re: Manned.org: Online manual pages for Arch (...and some other systems)

#9 2012-08-15 17:58:08

Re: Manned.org: Online manual pages for Arch (...and some other systems)

#10 2012-08-17 09:01:22

Re: Manned.org: Online manual pages for Arch (...and some other systems)

#11 2012-08-17 11:06:47

Re: Manned.org: Online manual pages for Arch (...and some other systems)

#12 2012-08-17 11:28:25

Re: Manned.org: Online manual pages for Arch (...and some other systems)

#13 2012-08-17 11:37:28

Re: Manned.org: Online manual pages for Arch (...and some other systems)

#14 2012-08-17 11:52:39

Re: Manned.org: Online manual pages for Arch (...and some other systems)

#15 2012-08-17 11:55:15

Re: Manned.org: Online manual pages for Arch (...and some other systems)

#16 2012-08-17 12:11:57

Re: Manned.org: Online manual pages for Arch (...and some other systems)

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