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!man curl displays no results #35

Closed sethbuzz closed 12 years ago

sethbuzz commented 12 years ago

The source site for man pages is a little dated, and a little unsupported

http://compute.cnr.berkeley.edu/cgi-bin/man-cgi?

has a broken image in the front page, and a copyright notice from 1994. I am sure that it is a great site, and has been useful for almost 20 years, but ddg might want to use a more inclusive site.

yegg commented 12 years ago

We've switched it a bunch because places keep closing down. Any suggestions?

kentfredric commented 12 years ago

I nominate @Getty to make one that doesn't suck if one can't be found.

ducks

Go Go.

;)

Getty commented 12 years ago

I think @kentfredric just nominated himself :-P

mrshu commented 12 years ago

Maybe we just can use this one. It claims to have 119686 manpages available.

Getty commented 12 years ago

Yes, I like this! lets use it :)

yegg commented 12 years ago

Hah, that's what we were using :). It went down twice for long periods of time.

Getty commented 12 years ago

lets cache the result for 6 months.... ;)

ah wait, stupid ;) its a bang ;) hehe

mrshu commented 12 years ago

Maybe this a good idea for a goodie.

Doing the same this as they did at man.cx (extracting data from Debian man pages) should not be that difficult.

yegg commented 12 years ago

I'm adding it to goodie request list and I also made a note internally to move it back to man.cx.

kentfredric commented 12 years ago

You /could/ add a cache layer for bangs, ie: http://man.cx.nyud.net/curl , it will make it waaay slow ( for the first hit at least ), but makes it slightly more resilient to failure. ( and subsequent hits are reasonably quick )

Getty commented 12 years ago

I always thought about a system that regulary checks if the bangs are still working and tells that the user when he uses one, the problem is the timeframe here, we cant check every 5 minute and we cant check every 6 hours ;)

kentfredric commented 12 years ago

You could, theoretically let users report fail/success , but the optimal way of doing this is a bit contentious.

You could do it by giving users the choice to "opt-in" to QA reporting at the theoretical expense of some minor security compromises, and then instead of bangs going off-site directly, an iframe is embedded in the standard DDG User Interface in place of the search results, and the !bang is displayed in that frame.

And you can then possibly automate down/up testing as part of the user navigation to that site ( but thats really messy code ) , or simply have "fail/success" reporting buttons added to the UI.

yegg commented 12 years ago

We have a good intern working on the bangs now, and it seems relatively straightforward to create (at least) a daily script to test they are working. Will set that in motion.