https://manpages.debian.org has been modernized! We have just launched a major update to our manpage repository. What used to be served via a CGI script is now a statically generated website, and therefore blazingly fast.

While we were at it, we have restructured the paths so that we can serve all manpages, even those whose name conflicts with other binary packages (e.g. crontab(5) from cron, bcron or systemd-cron). Don’t worry: the old URLs are redirected correctly.

Furthermore, the design of the site has been updated and now includes navigation panels that allow quick access to the manpage in other Debian versions, other binary packages, other sections and other languages. Speaking of languages, the site serves manpages in all their available languages and respects your browser’s language when redirecting or following a cross-reference.

Much like the Debian package tracker, manpages.debian.org includes packages from Debian oldstable, oldstable-backports, stable, stable-backports, testing and unstable. New manpages should make their way onto manpages.debian.org within a few hours.

The generator program (“debiman”) is open source and can be found at https://github.com/Debian/debiman. In case you would like to use it to run a similar manpage repository (or convert your existing manpage repository to it), we’d love to help you out; just send an email to stapelberg AT debian DOT org.

This effort is standing on the shoulders of giants: check out https://manpages.debian.org/about.html for a list of people we thank.

We’d love to hear your feedback and thoughts. Either contact us via an issue on https://github.com/Debian/debiman/issues/, or send an email to the debian-doc mailing list (see https://lists.debian.org/debian-doc/).