Finding man files: CVS or RPM repositories?

[Ville-Pekka Vainio]

Hi,

(CC'd to docs-list)

My summer project[1] is at a stage where I need to think about finding all of 
the man pages in a Fedora release. I have basic CVS integration working so 
that the user can specify a package and a branch and it imports the man pages 
from that package to the wiki (by downloading the source tarball). You can 
read more about the status of my project from my newest weekly report[2].

But what do you think is the best way of finding all of the man pages in a 
release? 

- Do a "cvs -co", parse it, download every source package and search for man 
files? 

- Or download filelists.xml from a repository mirror, parse it to find every 
package that contains man pages, then download the RPMs and extract the man 
pages from them?

- Any other ideas?

And in any case, how to handle package updates?

I'm starting to be in favour of the RPM repository choice. It was pointed to 
me in the comments of my blog[3] that sometimes the man files are edited in 
the .spec file and so taking the files from the binary RPMS might be a good 
thing.

Handling package updates would also be somewhat simple if I used RPM 
repositories, yum does that all the time ;)

Thanks in advance for your comments!

[1] http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/SummerOfCode/2007/VillePekkaVainio
[2] 
http://vpv.kapsi.fi/blog/2007/07/01/weekly-report-week-26-so-many-questions/
[3] 
http://vpv.kapsi.fi/blog/2007/07/01/weekly-report-week-26-so-many-questions/#comment-11

-- 
Ville-Pekka Vainio
vpivaini at cs.helsinki.fi
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