HTML/MAN docs - is it possible to pull the online docs down locally?

Questions / Help
1

Wanted to get some feedback. Have OTP installed on OpenBSD servers; don’t want to start installing from source just to have docs available (not really the OpenBSD way). But, I want offline OTP docs. Is there a script floating around – or something more canonical – to pull the online docs down locally?

I take it the `–enable-docs’ when source installing (again, not an option) since OTP 27 is for those great man pages I have come to love over the years. Ya?

I’d be fine with either the HTML or the MANDOCS (or whatever they are) locally, just can’t do this via `–enable-docs.’ THANKS!!!

2

You may find man and HTML archives for all releases in the downloads directory.

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3

In case anyone knows the quick answer, is there anything needing to be configured to get erl -man foo ticking along again after the manuals have been setup locally?

4

… seems to work just out of the box after playing with it.

5

Thank-you. Pretty close here. The contents of `otp_doc_man_27.3.tar.gz’ in there is missing the stdlib, kernel, etc. manuals.

Any idea where all those are at? Eg. erl -man lists yields nothing.

Here is the listing of manuals that are in that gzip-tar:

ct_run.1
snmpc.1
edoc.1
erl_call.1
cdv.1
diameterc.1
werl.1
typer.1
start_erl.1
start.1
run_erl.1
escript.1
erlsrv.1
erlc.1
erl.1
epmd.1
6

I get the feeling that things have shape-shifted beyond what I was expecting. There are no *.1 manuals in here: otp/lib/stdlib/doc/src at OTP-27.3 · erlang/otp · GitHub

Were manuals always generated? There is nothing that I can just copy over locally from source it seems.

Again, my goal is to copy thing like, say, `lists.1,’ to some path locally so I can do offline manual reading.

7

This is contrast to the HTML tgz, which has all the docs in there… it’s just the docs in that man tgz – for at least OTP 27.3.2 – that is limited to those mere sixteen-or-so manuals. I suppose I am interested in getting the UNIX-style mans locally at this point if anyone can show where these can be downloaded from…

8

Those are all things you can call from bash.

9

I know how to call those manuals up from the shell/bash – but I can’t seem to source the full set of OTP manuals. The link you initially offered has tgz for the mans, but within, only 16 manuals are in there. Looking for all the manuals. This is the case for OTP 27.3 at least…

Eg. https://erlang.org/download/otp_doc_man_27.3.tar.gz

curl -sL https://erlang.org/download/otp_doc_man_27.3.tar.gz | tar tzf -

In contrast, the following has oodles of the manuals:

curl -sL https://erlang.org/download/otp_doc_man_23.0.tar.gz | tar tzf -
10

See previous discussion here: Patch Package OTP 27.0.1 Released - #6 by raimo

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11

Thank-you. Will check it out.

Edit. Hot damn… no more manuals. Crazy.

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12

Man pages not a priority? They are a priority to me. I loved being able to stuff the man pages into an information retrieval system and find pages I didn’t even know existed and then view or typeset them in a variety of ways. This is like, oh, suddenly dropping ETS in favour of something sexier.

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13

I second that.
I am wordless, not only because my English vocabulary is not that long…

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14

Case in point: I was watching `tsoding’ cobble together a socket server in Erlang (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ilH6qb1AP6s) and there were serveral times where he was genuinely stuck (rare!) because he had OTP 28 installed, and his Emacs environment pulled in the manuals locally for him (as he of course wanted the Unix man-pages).

It pulled down the manuals for OTP 22 (I suppoe b/c later manuals are no more?), and when he looked up routines for this and that, some routines were nowhere to be found. Now, the Emacs tooling that auto-magically brings in the manuals is to blame for bringing in OTP 22 manuals, BUT, people want the Unix manuals. A lot of us can navigate them at incredible speeds from years of practice.

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