[SOLVED] How would you generate a copy of a Yocto project's man pages for offline references?

How would you generate a copy of a Yocto project's man pages for offline references?

Often in embedded systems, storage is a bit limited. Hence, you rather not bundle in all the man pages onboard. Later on, I still want to access the manual pages for the specific package versions present on the board. I'm referring to all the pages you can usually access when you type man <program>, when in a target device shell.

How to generate a local copy of the man pages of all packages installed on the device?

I'm especially interested, if it can output to a pdf and if Yocto has a official method for this.

Solution

Quick search in the reference manual for "man page" "man " and "manual page" shows: there's probably no official way.

If you generate them for your target already, the man pages are located in:

build/tmp/work/MACHINE-DISTRO/IMAGE/VERSION/rootfs/usr/share/man

Make sure to replace MACHINE etc. with your actual values, then cd into there and run:

man ./*.gz | enscript -p - | ps2pdf - man-pages.pdf

man ./file prints the man page. You could also run: man ./*.gz > man-pages.txt
Use enscript and ps2pdf to convert to pdf. - to read from stdin and/or print to stdout (check their man pages).

To automate this, add a recipe that depends on rootfs creation (do_image AFAIK) and performs those steps in the recipe.