!man bang redirect, for *nix man pages, is broken

thoroughburro

Steps to reproduce:
Try to search using “!man sed” or similar

Expected behavior:
A man page provider is queried and result returned.

Debug info:
It’s an easy one; the manpage.me service has been down for months. You just need to choose a new man page provider and switch it out.

Further suggestion, you could use some sort of dead man’s switch service to monitor the basic availability of your !bang providers to catch this early.

z64

You just need to choose a new man page provider and switch it out.

Happy to take a recommendation, from you or anyone else reading this. Whatever we pick needs to work with a URL template, like https://manpages.org/search?q=%s.

Do we think https://www.die.net/search/?q=epoll is okay?

Further suggestion, you could use some sort of dead man’s switch service to monitor the basic availability of your !bang providers to catch this early.

Could you elaborate what you mean by this? For reference, there is some 14,000 bangs in our dataset - I'm not sure we are terribly interested in creating infrastructure to make sure they all work correctly, but I'll let you elaborate...

We will also have a feature for custom bangs in the near future, which you will be able to use to personalize or repair anything faulty.

thoroughburro

It sounds like this won’t be fixed without my input, is that correct? If so, would you mind crediting my Kagi account a few months free to compensate for my labor? Once that’s done, I’m happy to take time to research a new search provider for this.

I wouldn’t ask, but I actually pay for this and wasn’t expecting to be asked for labor to fix such a trivial problem. Just copy and paste a working URL, basically.

I reported this one by email, was told it would be fixed. Followed up a month later, was directed here; wrote up the problem again. This is already longer than I’ve spent helping any other search engine, and this is one I pay for…

z64

thoroughburro Your personal input is not needed, but it is very valuable to us: it is customary for us to involve users in our process so that we know we're doing the right thing - it saves everyone time if we can make the correct change, once.

I wouldn’t ask, but I actually pay for this and wasn’t expecting to be asked for labor to fix such a trivial problem. Just copy and paste a working URL, basically.

Totally understandable. But understand that probably none of us at Kagi use the !man bang, and maybe you think my suggestion of die.net is awful for all I know, then you or someone else would be back here with another ticket... but it seems okay to me, and I didn't really find anything better that is compatible with how bangs work.

If you don't know of any others or have a preferance, that is fine! I will switch it to die.net for the next update.

seventhwave

Hi z64 ,
giving help here, If you need to.
Surely https://linux.die.net/man/ is a good practical choice for starting; for the future, the problems I see are:

is stagnating since few years
are only a bunch of good-will US friends

Another choice that could solve these two problems are Debian manpages: https://manpages.debian.org/
If you'll do the POST on the form, the urls doesn't seems to obey to your necessary condition: a simple querystring parameter.
But look closely to the explanation: to search the man page for "top" command, you could simply load https://manpages.debian.org/top , and the engine will fill in the other parameters (suite, binarypackage, etc)

Surely Debian is only a distribution, but surely a very old, extended and stable one...and I think that these pages will be up-to-date, reachable, mantained.

If you don't like this idea, please tell me and I'll go searching again.
Bye!