On Mon, Jul 30, 2012 at 10:39 PM, Ankur Sinha <sanjay.ankur@gmail.com> wrote:

On Tue, 2012-07-31 at 12:18 +0800, Christopher Meng wrote:
> I think we can get as many as possible.
>
> But it's really not an easy job.

I've just been looking at the man2html manual. Apparently, you don't
need to convert the man pages to html. The manual says:

> This can be used as a stand-alone utility, but is mainly intended as an auxiliary, to enable users to browse their man pages using a html browser like lynx(1), xmosaic(1) or net‐scape(1).

The manual then mentions quite a lot of stuff about CGI(something I know
ZERO about). I suggest we involve infra in the discussion? I know
bugzilla uses CGI, and infra would probably know how to use man2html?

One requirement seems to be that we have *all* man pages from *all* out
packages installed on the host so that man2html can run on it. I'm not
sure if we have a host that has all packages installed. Again, infra
would probably be able to shed more light on these details.

And, uh, I would like to help out on this ;)

I had a brief conversation with the guys in #fedora-admin about the idea this afternoon. It doesn't sound like there is a single resource that currently has every .rpm or src.rpm on it for us to play with for a new app, and they understandably weren't enthusiastic about enabling that kind of kludge. For every package, we'd have to find out if there was an update, pull the updated rpm/src.rpm, extract the manpages, parse over them, and push to the web app. TThey advised that the packages app looks like the best bet for accomplishing this in a sustainable manner, since it's digging through each rpm anyway. That doesn't gain us much besides affirmation, but it does give us somewhere to focus our efforts.