No man pages, but almost
The AWS Command Line Interface, which is available in Debian,
provides no man page. Instead, that tool has an integrated help system,
which allows you to run commands such as
aws rds
help, that, for what I have seen, generates some
reStructuredText, then converts it to a man page in troff format, then
calls troff to convert it to text with basic formatting, and eventually
passes it to a pager. Since this is close to what
man does, the
result looks like a degraded man page, with some features missing such
as the adaptation to the terminal width.
Well, this is better than nothing, and better than what many
under-documented tools can offer, but for several reasons, it still
sucks: most importantly, it does not respect administrators' habits and
it does not integrate with the system man database. You it does not
allow you to use commands such as
apropos,
and you will get no man page name auto-completion from your shell since
there is no man page.Generate the man pages
Now, since the integrated help system does generate a man page
internally, we can hack it to output it, and save it to a file:
Description: Enable a mode to generate troff man pages
The awscli help system internally uses man pages, but only to convert
them to text and show them with the pager. This patch enables a mode
that prints the troff code so the user can save the man page.
.
To use that mode, run the help commands with an environment variable
OUTPUT set to 'troff', for instance:
OUTPUT='troff' aws rds help
Forwarded: no
Author: Tanguy Ortolo <tanguy+debian@ortolo.eu>
Last-Update: 2016-11-22
Index: /usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/awscli/help.py
===================================================================
--- /usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/awscli/help.py 2016-11-21 12:14:22.236254730 +0100
+++ /usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/awscli/help.py 2016-11-21 12:14:22.236254730 +0100
@@ -49,6 +49,8 @@
Return the appropriate HelpRenderer implementation for the
current platform.
"""
+ if 'OUTPUT' in os.environ and os.environ['OUTPUT'] == 'troff':
+ return TroffHelpRenderer()
if platform.system() == 'Windows':
return WindowsHelpRenderer()
else:
@@ -97,6 +99,15 @@
return contents
+class TroffHelpRenderer(object):
+ """
+ Render help content as troff code.
+ """
+
+ def render(self, contents):
+ sys.stdout.buffer.write(publish_string(contents, writer=manpage.Writer()))
+
+
class PosixHelpRenderer(PagingHelpRenderer):
"""
Render help content on a Posix-like system. This includes
This patch must be applied from the root directory with
patch -p0, otherwise GNU patch will not
accept to work on files with absolute names.
With that patch, you can run help commands with an environment
variable
OUTPUT='troff' to get
the man page to use it as you like, for instance:
% OUTPUT='troff' aws rds help > aws_rds.1
% man -lt aws_rds.1 lp
Generate all the man pages
Now that we are able to generate the man page of any aws command,
all we need to generate all of them is a list of all the available
commands. This is not that easy, because the commands are somehow
derived from functions provided by a Python library named botocore,
which are derived from a bunch of configuration files, and some of them
are added, removed or renamed. Anyway, I have been able to write a
Python script that does that, but it includes a static list of these
modifications:
#! /usr/bin/python3
import subprocess
import awscli.clidriver
def write_manpage(command):
manpage = open('%s.1' % '_'.join(command), 'w')
command.append('help')
process = subprocess.Popen(command,
env= 'OUTPUT': 'troff' ,
stdout=manpage)
process.wait()
manpage.close()
driver = awscli.clidriver.CLIDriver()
command_table = driver._get_command_table()
renamed_commands = \
'config': 'configservice',
'codedeploy': 'deploy',
's3': 's3api'
added_commands = \
's3': ['cp', 'ls', 'mb', 'mv', 'presign', 'rb', 'rm', 'sync',
'website']
removed_subcommands = \
'ses': ['delete-verified-email-address',
'list-verified-email-addresses',
'verify-email-address'],
'ec2': ['import-instance', 'import-volume'],
'emr': ['run-job-flow', 'describe-job-flows',
'add-job-flow-steps', 'terminate-job-flows',
'list-bootstrap-actions', 'list-instance-groups',
'set-termination-protection',
'set-visible-to-all-users'],
'rds': ['modify-option-group']
added_subcommands = \
'rds': ['add-option-to-option-group',
'remove-option-from-option-group']
# Build a dictionary of real commands, including renames, additions and
# removals.
real_commands =
for command in command_table:
subcommands = []
subcommand_table = command_table[command]._get_command_table()
for subcommand in subcommand_table:
# Skip removed subcommands
if command in removed_subcommands \
and subcommand in removed_subcommands[command]:
continue
subcommands.append(subcommand)
# Add added subcommands
if command in added_subcommands:
for subcommand in added_subcommands[command]:
subcommands.append(subcommand)
# Directly add non-renamed commands
if command not in renamed_commands:
real_commands[command] = subcommands
# Add renamed commands
else:
real_commands[renamed_commands[command]] = subcommands
# Add added commands
for command in added_commands:
real_commands[command] = added_commands[command]
# For each real command and subcommand, generate a manpage
write_manpage(['aws'])
for command in real_commands:
write_manpage(['aws', command])
for subcommand in real_commands[command]:
write_manpage(['aws', command, subcommand])
'sync', 'website']
This script will generate more than 2,000 man page files in the
current directory; you will then be able to move them to
/usr/local/share/man/man1.
Since this is a lot of man pages, it may be appropriate to
concatenate them by major command, for instance all the
aws rds together
So much for my monthly blogging! Here s what I have been up to in the Open Source world over the last 6 months.
Debian
Confession time first I am not a frequent flyer at all. My first flight was in early late 2006. It was a 2 hour flight from Bombay (BOM) to Bengaluru (formerly Bangalore, BLG) . I still remember the trepidation, the nervousness and excitement the first time I took to air. I still remember the flight very vividly,
It was a typical humid day for Bombay/Mumbai and we (me and a friend) had gone to Sahar (the domestic airport) to take the flight in the evening. Before starting the sky had turned golden-orange and I was wondering how I would feel once I would be in air.We started at around 20:00 hours in the evening and as it was a clear night were able to see the
I do hope that we also do get reciprocity from those countries as well. 
My monthly report covers a large part of what I have been doing in the free software world. I write it for 
Drought here since August. The small cistern ran dry a month ago, which has
never happened before. The large cistern was down to some 900 gallons. I
don't use anywhere near the national average of 400 gallons per day. More
like 10 gallons. So could have managed for a few more months.
Still, this was worrying, especially as the area moved from severe to
extreme drought according to the
There are about 15 Netfilter packages in Debian, and they are maintained
by separate people.
Yersterday, I contacted the maintainers of the main packages to propose
the creation of a pkg-netfilter team to maintain all the packages together.
The benefits of maintaining packages in a team is already known to all, and
I would expect to rise the overall quality of the packages due to this
movement.
By now, the involved packages and maintainers are:
You might wonder why there is so high number of 
FOSDEM 2016 is going to be great (again!) and you still have the chance to be one of the stars.
Have you submitted your talk to the Desktops DevRoom yet?
No?
Remember: we will only accept proposals until December 5th. After that, the Organization Team will get busy and vote and choose the talks.
Here is the full Call for Participation, in case you need to check the details on how to submit:
Since 2008 I use two monitors in my desktop. Yesterday I bought a new graphics interface and a third monitor. Some time I was looking for a low cost graphics interface. Ok, I am using GeForce GT 740 which has three output ports: VGA, DVI and HDMI. In Brazil this interface card can be found around R$ 400 (US$ 117, but my card was US$ 87 in Brazilian Black Friday). In Amazon.com, it is between US$ 51 and US$ 109. The chosen manufacturer was Zotac, but all GT 740 and 750 will work fine (I tested the GT 750 too).
The GeForce GT 740 was imediatelly recognised by Debian Jessie with kernel Linux 4.7.0 from Backports (it is my default, so I didn't test with original 3.16 kernel). The driver used was the default X.Org Nouveau. I use KDE and the management was easy.
I hope this post can help people interested in use 3 monitors. Enjoy!
This is now a little overdue, but here it is. On the 10th and 11th of November,
the 
I am a incorrigibly in picking non-mainstream, open smartphones, and then struggling hard. Back then in 2008, I tried to 
I don't often write on this blog, and when I do, it's either tech related,
or light life stuff.
Over the next few weeks, it's going to get a lot more political. If you
currently follow this blog for its technical content, you may be tempted to
tune out. I would encourage you to stay and listen. I'm passionate about
the technology that I work on; but the greatest problems facing our world
today are not ones that will be solved with software.
American democracy is in bad shape, and it's because of what we're doing to
it. This is not a problem of the Right or of the Left; it is not a problem
that began with the election of Donald Trump, and it's not a problem that
will go away at the end of his term. It is partly a structural problem with
the way our elections work, but more than that it's a problem of how we're
splitting into separate tribes, isolating ourselves from those who don't
agree with us.
As