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
This is now a little overdue, but here it is. On the 10th and 11th of November,
the second
vmdebootstrap sprint took place. Lars Wirzenius (liw),
Ana
Custura (ana_c) and myself were present. liw focussed on the core of
vmdebootstrap, where he sketched out what the future of vmdebootstrap may look
like. He documented this in a mailing list
post and also presented (video).
Ana and myself worked on live-wrapper, which uses vmdebootstrap internally for
the squashfs generation. I worked on improving logging, using a better method
for getting paths within the image, enabling generation of Packages and Release
files for the image archive and also made the images installable (live-wrapper
0.5 onwards will include an installer by default).
Ana worked on the inclusion of HDT and memtest86+ in the live images and
enabled both ISOLINUX (for BIOS boot) and GRUB (for EFI boot) to boot the
text-mode and graphical installers.
live-wrapper 0.5 was released on the 16th November with these fixes included.
You can find live-wrapper documentation at
https://live-wrapper.readthedocs.io/en/latest/. (The documentation still needs
some work, some options may be incorrectly described).
Thanks to the sponsors that made this work possible. You re awesome. (:
A new version of the 
Took me a hell of a long time to get my head out of my arse and dive again
into some Debian related work. Thanks to Nik for pushing me from time
to time.
So I've taken the time to upload LyX 2.2.2 to unstable and it's now
build with Qt5. Afterall the package is still missing a lot of love,
but I hope we've once again something for the upcoming stable release,
that is close to the latest upstream stable release. If you use LyX please
give it a try.
For myself it's now the 6th year that I stopped using LyX after maintaining
it for five years. And still I'm sponsoring the uploads and try to keep it
at least functional. Strange how we sometimes take care of stuff even if we
no longer have an active use for them.
I am a incorrigibly in picking non-mainstream, open smartphones, and then struggling hard. Back then in 2008, I tried to 
I spent a few days in Cambridge for a minidebconf. This is a tiny
version of the full annual Debconf. We had a couple of days for
hacking, and another two days for talks.
I spent my hacking time on thinking about vmdebootstrap (my tool for
generating disk images with an installed Debian), and came to the
conclusion I need to atone my sins for writing such crappy code by
rewriting it from scratch to be nicer to use. I gave a talk about
this, too. The
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 
Like I wrote before, 
Even though the 
Updates to Altos Lisp
I 
