Announcing the Ubuntu Manpage Repository

[Dustin Kirkland]

On Sat, Sep 6, 2008 at 4:57 AM, Dotan Cohen <dotancohen at gmail.com> wrote:
> Would it not be better to contribute to The Linux Documentation
> Project? I'm not being cynical, but this looks like a case of NIH.
>
> http://tldp.org/

Hi Dotan-

The page, http://tldp.org/manpages/man.php lists several similar
efforts to ubuntu.manpages.com.  Most of these are familiar to me:
 * http://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/online_pages.html
 * http://www.linuxcommand.org/superman_pages.php
 * http://www2.linuxpakistan.net/man.php
 * http://linux.ctyme.com
 * http://www.phpman.info/
 * http://man.he.net/
 * http://www.linuxmanpages.com/

I believe that manpages.ubuntu.com is more useful specifically to
Ubuntu users than any of the above sites for several reasons:
 * each page is its own HTML (ie, not CGI-generated), so it can be
indexed by Google, Yahoo, and other search engines
 * it also provides the compressed, original gzip'd manpage, such that
man can be extended to download manpages directly from the web using
wget or curl
 * it has the "Ubuntu look and feel", like our other documentation
sites, such as help.ubuntu.com and wiki.ubuntu.com
 * it is entirely free of advertisements and commercials
 * it contains the precise revision of each manpage as found in the
various Ubuntu releases
 * there are some subtle (and no so subtle) differences between Ubuntu
manpages and core utilities from other Debian, Red Hat, SuSE, et al.
distributions

In terms of contribution, all of the source code necessary to generate
the repository is available under the GPLv3 in a project on Launchpad,
and I welcome extensions of the work:
 * https://launchpad.net/ubuntu-manpage-repository

As for direct contribution to The Linux Documentation Project, I'm not
sure I understand your suggestion.

:-Dustin