Find architecture specific man pages in man.cgi

[Fernando Apesteguía]

On Wed, Mar 3, 2021 at 5:52 PM Wolfram Schneider <wosch at freebsd.org> wrote:

> 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.
>

Hi Wolfram,

Thank you for looking into this. I was having a look at this PR:
https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=212290

While that specific PR refers to 10.3 that is not a supported release, I
found that we still reference pae(4) in the hardware notes for currently
supported releases:

https://www.freebsd.org/releases/11.4R/hardware/#proc-i386
https://www.freebsd.org/releases/12.2R/hardware/

All those pages will have a broken link to pae(4) via our main.cgi
interface. I suspect that the hardware notes for 13.0-RELEASE will suffer
the same problem.

It seems to me that at least for the man.cgi interface we should have all
the man pages available.

In -CURRENT, building manpages with:

make MAN_ARCH=all install

generates a 24 Mb /usr/share/man directory. Exactly the same as if I build
only for amd64, so the difference in disk space is negligible:

$ du -ch /usr/share/man/
[snip]
...
 24M    /usr/share/man/
 24M    total

In addition, man pages like hptnr.4 which are installed in a am64
installation reference a non-existent pae(4) man page.

Cheers.


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