On Mon, Oct 04, 2010 at 10:05:33AM -0700, Dustin Kirkland wrote: > I like the idea of moving almost all documentation to the web. > manpages.ubuntu.com has both an HTML rendering of every manpage, as > well as the .gz original manpage. The 'dman' utility can remotely > retrieve manpages from m.u.c and display them on a console. It could > easily be enhanced to cache them locally in /var/cache, too.
As the man-db maintainer, this deeply concerns me. Adding support for transparent web retrieval is one thing; that would be kind of cool. However, I think the typical sysadmin expectation is that 'man foo' should give you answers quickly and without any messing about (e.g. on firewalled machines), and I feel that retrieving pages from the web as the default mode of operation is contrary to that. For that matter, the times when your network connection isn't working are often the times when a local quick reference guide in the form of a manual page is exactly what you need, and who's to say that the one you need would be cached? I looked in the nearest chroot I had to hand, which was a fresh debootstrap of natty with build-essential and a few other build-dependencies installed; it should be fairly close to the existing minimal install. In this chroot, /usr/share/man consumes slightly over 11MB, while the entire chroot consumes 405MB (I don't know how the absolute numbers corresponds to a server installation, but I expect that the ratio is similar). Surely this can't be the lowest-hanging fruit, or even low-enough-hanging to justify the problems it would cause? Manual pages are a simple, effective, and quick form of reference, and probably the best-translated form of documentation on our system with the exception of the high-profile guides. They excel at orienting a sysadmin, particularly those unfamiliar with the exact details of the operating system at hand. In my experience, server operating systems that don't pay attention to making sure that manual pages always Just Work pay the price for it in frustrated sysadmins. I haven't heard complaints about man not working properly out of the box in Debian or Ubuntu since shortly after I took it over (just before then, it was a frequent cause of vocal irritation), while I still hear friends complaining about it on proprietary Unix systems from time to time, and that's a point of pride for me. We should celebrate manual pages, not push them off our installed system as a space optimisation. So absolutely, let's make it easier to get at manual pages stored on the web from the command line, so that you can easily read documentation for packages you don't have installed; if somebody wants to allocate me some work time to work on my favourite hobby project, I have no problem with that. :-) If somebody has sufficiently delicate space constraints that they have to 'rm -rf /usr/share/man' and use the new dpkg filters support (thanks to Tollef and Martin!) to make sure it stays gone, then we should support that choice. But I don't think they should be anywhere near the top of our list to remove from single-purpose server environments, which still go wrong from time to time and need to be repaired. -- Colin Watson [[email protected]] -- ubuntu-devel mailing list [email protected] Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel
