On Sat, May 13, 2017 at 5:44 AM, Robert Elz <k...@munnari.oz.au> wrote: > Date: Sat, 13 May 2017 01:44:35 +0530 > From: Abhinav Upadhyay <er.abhinav.upadh...@gmail.com> > Message-ID: > <CAHwRYJ=baNR3jsz4ov4zL6n=rfjlg4r-zropyxblgnuu_p0...@mail.gmail.com> > > | If you have any feedback or improvements in mind, please let me know :-) > > Have you considered (is it possible?) to do multi-platform searches. > > That is, in the "which release" menu, add "all", and ideally also: > > "all NetBSD" (all the NetBSD-* releases available) > (similar for FreeBSD, OpenBSD, linux, posix) > "all stable" (NetBSD 7.1, FreeBSD 11.0 OpenBSD..., Linux...) > (probably also the earliest, maybe newest, posix) > "all development" (*-current or whatever, and the most recent posix) > > In these cases the output would also need to identify (for each result > returned) which release it came from. This would make it much easier > to look for differences in the manual for xxx between NetBSD 6 and 7 > (for example) or between NetBSD and FreeBSD.
That's an interesting idea. I have different databases for each of the operating systems' man pages, I would have to fire the query on each of them and combine the results. It will probably be simpler to put it on a new html page. Another challenge will be the ranking of the results. I guess I could take the top 5 results from each of the databases and combine them. > > If you can arrange to look in more than one release, and identify the > output, adding the various combinations as search choices should be > easy (you could even provide a checkbox interface, instead of a dropdown, > and allow the user to pick whatever releases to search are desired.) Yes, a check box based interface would be more appropriate. > > A way to compare man pages would be really nice ... (this would be hard, > diff'ing the formatted versions would not be productive, and diff'ing > the raw data would not produce something nice to look at, so it would > need to diff the raw, then find the places in the formatted output where > the differences occur, and show those.) This sounds like a very big > project however... mandoc(1) produces an AST of the man pages, possibly the AST could be compared. Still a hard problem :) > Also, I don't know where the posix-* data comes from, but posix-2016 ought > be available now (that is, it is released, whether you can get at it or not > for this purpose I have no idea.) The posix man pages are from the Linux man-pages project. They have been granted permission from IEEE and The Open Project to distribute the posix man pages: https://lwn.net/Articles/581858/ I don't see any posix-2016 man pages available yet there: https://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/docs/man-pages/man-pages-posix/ Thank you for the feedback and the ideas. I will try to work on adding search across releases :-) - Abhinav
