Find architecture specific man pages in man.cgi

[Daniel Ebdrup Jensen]

On Wed, Mar 03, 2021 at 05:52:44PM +0100, Wolfram Schneider 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.
>
>-Wolfram
>
>-- 
>Wolfram Schneider <wosch at FreeBSD.org> https://wolfram.schneider.org
>

Hi folks,

      I'm hoping this is one of the things we'll be able to address, when
      we move from having man.freebsd.org transition from man.cgi over to
      using mandoc -Thtml.

      There are also a bunch of minor nits where man.cgi does not behave
      like mandoc (I was hoping the user who mentioned it would file a
      bug, but I don't think this has happened yet), and mandoc also
      renders html anchors for Sh macros (man.cgi does this too), as well
      as Ss macros, Fl macros, and many others, which make it possible to
      deep link to individual options on the website.

      The transistion from man.cgi to mandoc -Thtml isn't really started
      yet, as it's part of a bigger project to rewamp the project website
      (don't know about the visuals) - a lot of it is back-end stuff in
      order to improve URIs to make them easier for us humans to
      remember. Once everything is in place, I believe the plan is to
      move from HTTP 302 redirectino to HTTP 301, so that every search
      engine and web crawler will pick up on the changed URIs.

      Part of the issue is that FreeBSDs manual page archive takes up
      over 10GB when compressed, so working with it in any aspect isn't
      necessarily easy. ;)

Yours,
Daniel Ebdrup Jensen
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