This directory contains the following.
1. man2html
This is a pure manroff -> html converter.
No manpath search etc.
Call: man2html [-l | -H host.domain:port] [filename]
The contents of FILENAME (or STDIN, in case FILENAME is "-" or absent)
are converted from man-style nroff to html, and printed on STDOUT.
With "-l" URLs of the form "lynxcgi:/home/httpd/cgi-bin/..." are generated.
With "-H host" we make URLs of the form "http://host/cgi-bin/...".
The default is "http://localhost/cgi-bin/...".
2. A collection of scripts
This part is not installed by "make install" of the global Makefile.
There are security considerations: it is very unlikely that these
scripts (still in alpha) are secure, so for the time being they
should only be used where security is not a major concern.
If you are not afraid, or are not running a httpd, do
"make install-scripts" in this directory.
This does three things: install man stuff, install glimpse stuff,
and install user interface stuff.
2A. man stuff
This first part (that can be done separately with "make install-man-scripts")
puts various scripts under /home/httpd/cgi-bin and /home/httpd/cgi-aux
in a subdirectory man.
It will create a directory /var/man2html to hold the indices.
(This directory should be writable by the cgi scripts;
probably that means that the owner should be nobody.
Choose a group and add all non-httpd users that should be
able to write this directory to that group.)
Structure of the collection of scripts:
man2html is the main script.
It uses man.aux when called without arguments.
It uses manwhatis when asked for an index of manpages+descriptions.
It uses mansec when asked for a compact index of manpages.
It uses mansearch when asked for a glimpse search.
In its turn mansearch uses mansearch.aux when called
without arguments. It uses mansearchhelp (which uses
mansearchhelp.aux) when asked for help.
2B. glimpse stuff
The second part (that can be done separately with
"make install-glimpse-stuff") installs .glimpse_filters
in /var/man2html, in order to tell glimpse what decompressors to use.
2C. user interface stuff
The third part (that can be done separately with "make install-hman")
installs a user interface to these scripts in /usr/bin/hman.
Now people can say
alias man=/usr/bin/hman
and have a man that uses a html browser.
The browser is chosen via environment variables - look at the script.
3. Glimpse.
For the glimpse part, I quote Michael Hamilton:
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To use the Glimpse full text searching, you will need to install
glimpse in /usr/bin. Redhat rpm users can get glimpse from
ftp://ftp.redhat.com/pub/contrib/i386/glimpse-4.0-6.i386.rpm
The glimpse home ftp site is cs.arizona.edu. N.B. glimpse is not
freely redistributable for commercial use, I'd be very interested in a
more liberal alternative. Having installed glimpse, you will need to
build a glimpse index in /var/man2html. This doesn't take too long -
about 3 minutes on my 486DX2/66 16MB machine. As root do:
/usr/bin/glimpseindex -z -H /var/man2html /usr/man/man* /usr/X11R6/man/man* \
/usr/local/man/man* /opt/man/man*
chmod ugo+r /var/man2html/.glimpse*
The -z option causes glimpse to apply any filters (for decompression etc)
specified in /var/man2html/.glimpse_filters.
This could be set up as a cron job in /etc/crontab, e.g. (the following
must be all on one line):
21 04 * * 1 root /usr/bin/glimpseindex -z -H /var/man2html /usr/man/man*
/usr/X11R6/man/man* /usr/local/man/man* /opt/man/man* ;
chmod +r /var/man2html/.glimpse*
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