Re: How do I get the man page for a package I haven't installed yet?

On 2020-06-26 18:45, Theo de Raadt wrote:
> Jordan Geoghegan <jordan@geoghegan.ca> wrote:
>
>>
>>
>> On 2020-06-26 13:43, Marc Espie wrote:
>>> On Tue, Jun 23, 2020 at 12:20:35PM -0600, Theo de Raadt wrote:
>>>> Ottavio Caruso <ottavio2006-usenet2012@yahoo.com> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> Hi,
>>>>>
>>>>> Unless I've got it all wrong, <https://man.openbsd.org/> will only
>>>>> display man pages for programs and commands in base. Is there a way to
>>>>> display the man page for a package/port I haven't installed and/or
>>>>> downloaded yet? (This assumes I haven't downloaded the ports cvs
>>>>> tree).
>>>> Doing that would be very annoying and painful, and very few people
>>>> would want it. It would also substantially degrade the clarity at
>>>> man.openbsd.org
>>> Actually, it ought to be feasible to have the same mechanism in place for
>>> base as a third party mechanism.
>>>
>>> I don't think it would be that difficult to setup, this obviously ought to
>>> be separate from the main OpenBSD installation, as the quality of manpages
>>> from ports is often not up-to-par compared to base.
>>>
>>> Both Ingo and naddy and I, we've been routinely passing all manpages from
>>> all packages through groff and mandoc and makewhatis to the point that
>>> over 99% of them would be clean for a usage similar to man.openbsd.org
>>>
>> FreeBSD appears to offer manual pages from ports on their man page
>> website: https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi
>>
>> Not advocating for anything, just thought I'd point it out.
> Completely irrelevant.
>

I thought it was relevant for folks looking for http access to ports
manpages, as the FreeBSD and OpenBSD ports trees overlap significantly.
I often use that site when I'm on a machine that doesn't happen to have
the particular package installed whose manpage I want to view.

Regards,

Jordan