On Fri, 2 Feb 2001, Matt Morrison wrote:
> >She asked if there was programs that presented man in html and I said
> >that I thought so. Then she said why isn't it used automatically, is
> >this some tribal rite you unix fantasist must undergo when you learn new
> >things.
> Speaking of which...
> I'm currently starting a project on sourceforge called php-man-gateway
> (throw that in front of sourceforge.net to get the homepage). There's really
> nothing there at the moment except a minimal PHP script that pipes the
> output of 'man [section] command' through 'col -b' to remove nasties and
> displays it inside of a <pre> </pre> block. I'm hoping to eventually make a
> functional alternative to 'man2html' in PHP, with automatic linking to other
> pages, fun colors and font sizes, and all that type of stuff. As it exists
> currently, check out http://mattman.dhs.org/man.php for the real thing,
> man.phps for the source. Hopefully I can get the sourceforge site somewhat
> functional in a few days, and get development going. Any help would be much
> appreciated, as this is as much an excercise to teach myself PHP than
> anything else.
I'd like to contribute to this project. I'm fairly fluent in PHP, having
just used it to put together a web-based database, and I think this
unification of the assorted documentation is a good idea.
Some of the features I'd like to see (and am willing to code are):
Ability to access man, texinfo, HOWTO, /usr/share/doc/..., rpm -qi
information through the same interface.
Nice presentation (ie not just using pre-formatted text in the way
Konqueror does currently). This will probably require use of the .texi
source for the texinfo docs.
Good cross-linking between the various types of documentation. In
particular, a man page that says "I'm out of date, use the texinfo
documentation instead" should never be displayed. Links from man pages
("See also:") should not go straight to the target man page, but should
go to a general "about this topic" page that then has links to all the
relevant types of documentation on that topic.
A search facility, either using 'apropos' or possibly by letting htdig
index the whole PHP-generated documentation tree.
Some kind of advice on which source of information to look at. If a
particular topic has a man page, an info page, a HOWTO and some
documentation under /usr/share/doc/, then the user should not just be
presented with a blank list, but also with a few guidelines on where to
start (e.g. "for basic instructions on how to use this command" -> man
page, "for in-depth details" -> /usr/share/doc/... etc.)
The main problem I can foresee is that we will need Apache running on
every machine in order for this to work.
Michael
