Talk:Full manpages
Not sure if the wiki is the place to host Gentoo specific man pages
Hi P.Fox (Ris) ,
I haven't been present in the IRC channel for the past couple of days due to a server hardware issue and I'm just now seeing this page. I'm not sure the wiki is the best place for man page documentation for a few reasons, but primarily because man pages can be updated and it would take a manual 'sync' in order to update the associated wiki page. I'd rather see an official Gentoo site stood up that can automatically generate man pages based on the man pages provided from the project sources. Not sure exactly the best way to implement this, but it would be great to snag the man page artifacts produce by the CI/CD pipeline. I'll have to ask someone about this. In terms of man pages on the wiki, we already link to man7.org's Man page project with the {{Manpage}} template for the aforementioned reason, and I'm thinking a Gentoo-specific site could be created for Gentoo-specific man pages from official projects (Portage, etc.). Thoughts? --Maffblaster (talk) 19:31, 31 May 2022 (UTC)
- Hi!
- I think you are right that this isn't the best place for this. I just figured that this was an easy solution, and I could update the pages from time to time... after all, the whole wiki always basically needs updating to keep in sync with the entire OS, and it's maybe easier to copy a man page to the wiki than to figure out how something works and write docs about it :). Like the "invocation" templates that similarly should "regularly" be copied from an active system to the wiki. Of course I'm not opposed to removing it - just seemed better to have than not to, maybe a stopgap until something better is done...?
- Months ago, I looked into automating man page retrieval for all Gentoo packages. I wanted to kludge onto the (apparently excellent) Arch man website software to start off with, just to see what I could do, but as you say, you basically need the something like a CI/CD server just to extract the man pages... plus a database to track each built package. I'd have loved to be able to do something like the Arch site for Gentoo, but it seems a relatively large project... unless maybe, as you say, things could be snagged of preexisting build servers...
- We had a big chat about this on IRC, where similar points were raised, maybe just when you where away. Do you mind if I post you the log in pm (or pastebin) ?
- In any case, I'm fine if this section is deemed inadvisable, though for the time being I'm wondering if it isn't better than nothing. I'd be all for something like the Arch site, especially for all packages - if there is anything I can do to help.