FAQ

Can I browse those manpages in a terminal?

Why yes you can! In the debian-goodies package, since version 0.70 (buster and later), there is a dman command which fetches pages from this site dynamically. If you can't install the package directly for some reason, you can also download and run the source code. Review the source before running to make sure it hasn't been compromised!

Where to report problems in manpages?

There are 3 different places where problems in manpage rendering might need to be reported:

If the manpage renders correctly in some manpage viewers, but not on manpages.debian.org, this might likely be a limitation/bug with mdocml (the renderer we use). Report at mdocml.
If the manpage contains wrong content, and was added by the Debian package maintainer, report at the Debian bug tracker.
If the manpage contains wrong content and comes from the upstream software, report at the upstream bug tracker. Follow the Package tracker link on the given manpage to find out which package is responsible for the manpage, and follow the "homepage" link. If there is no homepage, file a bug against the Debian bug tracker.

Where to report problems with the service?

If the manpages are usually rendered correctly or you do not exactly know where the problem is, it is possible the problem is with debiman itself, in which case feel free to open an issue on Github.

Note: the Github issue tracker is for software-specific issues. If there are issues with the service (e.g. server not found or other service issues), the bug should be reported against the manpages.debian.org pseudo-package.

I have an improvement to make on the site

If you have found an issue and know of a solution, there's a good chance you can fix it yourself as well. If the problem is in the manpage content, see the above FAQ entry on where to report and contribute a fix. If the problem is within the Debiman software itself, pull requests are welcome on Github. If the problem is in the content of one of those static pages, you may need to make changes to the static assets repository.

Changes to the static assets are picked up by Debiman cron job, which runs every 4 hours. Then the changes are propagated through a Debian static mirror infrastructure, which adds an additional delay. Changes to templates are not propagated until manpages themselves are re-generated. A full regeneration run can be ran by hand, but takes a few hours to complete, with the following command on manziarly.debian.org:

    sudo -u manpages \
      /srv/manpages.debian.org/debiman/run-debiman.bash \
      -force_rerender 2>&1 | tee ~/dm-full-rerender.log

Note that you will need to set a sudo password before you can run commands through sudo.

Debiman looks great, how can I deploy it myself?

Debiman is free software so you are free (and indeed, encouraged) to reuse this platform for your own need. The source code is hosted on Github and the site-specific text for this site is hosted on Alioth, which may be useful as an example of how to customize this text in your own instance.

You should not, however, use that repository as is, unless you wish to run a mirror of this documentation, in which case you should contact the maintainers first (see above for contact information).

Also note that there is some Debian-specific code in Debiman you may need to change to make it work with your distribution, see issue #56 for more information about that limitation.

Question not answered?

If you have any more question that is not answered here, please direct your questions to the Debian Documentation Mailing List.