So does anyone else like having locally installed documentation?
I was working on packaging documentation for libraries I've uploaded to Debian, and I wonder if anyone else likes using them?
@CobaltVelvet I've been thinking about improving Debian's doc viewer doc-central so it could search the indexes sphinx builds.
Also maybe a stylesheet or assume that tab exist.
@alienghic YES. Not the same context but, man pages are the Stuff, and I was thrilled to see that GitLab installs with LOCAL documentation, while most desktop apps seem to fail when using their Help menu--because all the documentation is online, but doesn't exist or bad URL or whatever.
@dlek I hate it when documentation 404s.
@alienghic I like having them available if I need to do work on a plane or somewhere else with patchy WiFi but wouldn't routinely install them due to the low storage space on SSDs, especially the latest Macbook Pro models
@robinjanssens I thought I'd check the sizes of some of the documentation I care about. Python 3.6 is very efficient at only 106K, but Pandas? 67M, Statsmodels is even worse at 82M
@robinjanssens Ah ha. python3.6's html files were hidden in the main binary package, and not the -doc package and so are actually 43M. That seems more believable.
@alienghic The problem with information in /usr/share/doc or wherever is that it's hard to find. The only local doc I use on a regular basis is Perl because it's integrated into man, and Emacs, because it's integrated into Emacs. I don't often use Python and perhaps that's why I still can't find things with pydoc. Thus, Python, glibc and everything else? I search for it online. Stack Overflow provide the additional benefit of including examples. Reference manuals often lack these.
@kensanata There's several tools that provide search capabilities for registered documentation in /usr/share/doc/ listed at https://wiki.debian.org/doc-base
However a fair number of packages don't build the documentation, or register it with doc-base.
Also it's hard to match Google for relevant results.
@alienghic I wasn’t aware of these!
@alienghic i don't like using them but i love knowing they're around