What happened to the manpages?

Today I went to fvwm.org and tried to find the manpages, but they were gone. Then I used a search engine to search for the manpages, but links lead to error 404. Why has the manpages been removed?

They were for fvwm2 and had not been updated in ages.

We can add them back for fvwm3, which would be easier now that they’re being generated via asciidoctor.

Why not just build the manpages and view them on your own system? This will ensure you get the manpages for the version you are actually running.

I used to view them in the browser and just got used to doing it that way. I wasn’t even aware that the entirety of the manpages were available. In hindsight it is obvious though.
What I like about the browser manpages is that there was a main page with links to all the manpages and subchapters. I doubt this exists with using man in the cli. I’ll be happy if I’m oroven wrong though

In fvwm3, the manual pages have been split into smaller subpages, but yes you have to search for terms, or just use the man pager to move through the cli.

With asscidoctor it should be easier to make html output, though here it would probably be better to just have a local copy to match the version you are running.

Could you guys make a html manpage like the previous one, or at least tell me how to generate it myself?

The following patch will add an option --enable-htmldoc that will build the manual pages and install them in $FVWM_DATADIR/htmldoc. You can also use asciidoctor to build html pages from the .adoc source in the doc/ directory (the patch should give you some idea how to do that). This will only work for fvwm3, since fvwm2 doesn’t use asciidoctor.

If you really want a local copy of the old fvwm2 manual pages, you can grab them from the github repo, and just revert to the commit to right before they were removed, and copy the .html files to a location of your choosing. In essence just revert this PR using git tools.

Wow, thank you. This is exactly what I wanted

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