[RFC] Ubuntu Manpages Website

[Dustin Kirkland]

Hi-

I just registered a new blueprint, for a website dedicated to a
comprehensive set of dynamically generated/updated HTML markup of all
Ubuntu manpages.

https://blueprints.launchpad.net/ubuntu-doc/+spec/ubuntu-manpage-website/

I'm aware of http://manpages.debian.net and
http://www.linuxmanpages.com, however neither of these are dedicated
to the particular packages nor versions included in Ubuntu.  I feel
that this is an important piece of documentation missing from the
publications on http://help.ubuntu.com.  Please let me know if this
information currently exists.

I'm proposing a section of the Ubuntu documentation, perhaps
http://help.ubuntu.com/manpages dedicated to this purpose.

I have a working prototype temporarily at
http://ubuntu.dustinkirkland.com/manpages with manpages from (dapper,
edgy, feisty, gutsy, hardy) x (main, restricted, universe,
multiverse).  This constitutes approximately 2.1GB of data, and 250K
HTML pages.

Currently, there are 2 small shell scripts which are able to generate
this data, and use man2html to render the HTML.  While there is
considerable room for improvement, the foundation is at least there.
Also, it will be essential to have Google index the entire data set,
for which we'd need accurate sitemaps, etc. such that the
documentation search engines could use this data as well.

I plan to spend some time (planned or ad hoc) at UDS Prague discussing
this with a few key individuals.

-- 
:-Dustin