Find architecture specific man pages in man.cgi

[Wolfram Schneider]

On Wed, 3 Mar 2021 at 16:04, Fernando Apesteguía <fernape at freebsd.org> wrote:
>
> Hi all,
>
> I'm trying to access the pae(4) man page from the man.cgi interface at
> https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi. Looking just for "pae" with the
> default search does not show any results:
>
> https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=pae&apropos=0&sektion=0&manpath=FreeBSD+12.2-RELEASE+and+Ports&arch=default&format=html
>
> The Architecture drop list only shows "All architectures". pae(4) is i386
> specific (src/share/man/man4/man4.i386/pae.4) and I understand it should be
> shown somehow.
>
> After tinkering with the combos, I got this URL for a query and I noticed
> the arch=default parameter. I changed that to arch=i386 but still I can not
> get it to show the page.
>
> https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=pae&apropos=0&sektion=4&
> manpath=FreeBSD+12.2-RELEASE+and+Ports&arch=default&format=html
>
> Similar problems occur with other architecture specific man pages like
> imx_wdog(4) for arm.
>
> What am I missing?

Hi Fernando,

The FreeBSD man pages are based on the released packages, e.g.
http://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/releases/amd64/12.2-RELEASE/

We are using amd64 because this is the main platform today (tier1).

Unfortunately, the packages contain only the man pages for the given
architecture. This wasn't always the case, up to FreeBSD 9.3 we
delivered all man pages for all architectures.

you can read the old pae(4) man page here:
https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=pae&manpath=FreeBSD+9.3-RELEASE&arch=i386

I don't know why we made this change to our build system, and if this
was intentionally. I think it is a mistake. I want to read i386 man
pages on an amd64 machine.

-Wolfram

-- 
Wolfram Schneider <wosch at FreeBSD.org> https://wolfram.schneider.org