How to get the fossil docs offline

Question

There are lots of docs on the fossil page, am I just supposed to checkout the whole repo to view them offline? The man-pages are rather sparse, and unlike in git, there seem to be no meta-manpages encompassing the topics covered in the online documentation, such as https://fossil-scm.org/home/doc/trunk/www/globs.md.

Answer 1

(A long-time fossil contributor here...)

Fossil, as it has always been distributed by the Fossil project, is only a single binary, not a bundle with the docs. Getting offline access to all of the docs requires cloning the repository:

fossil clone https://fossil-scm.org/home fossil.fossil

but it doesn't require checking out the repository. After cloning, do:

fossil ui fossil.fossil

And you'll have all of the docs at your fingertips. That documentation is intended to be viewed from within fossil, e.g. it uses fossil-specific markup, so providing it under, e.g., /usr/share or some such would not be terribly helpful.

The majority of day-to-day usage questions can be answered via the built-in help command, but the slew of documentation we maintain is far too large to include in the fossil binary.

The fossil man page is essentially just a stub for the benefit of Linux distributions which require one for binaries included in their package databases, noting that that's not something we do within the fossil project: all such packages are maintained by independent third parties.

Edit: for future reference: you'll get more much timely responses over in the fossil's own forum (just follow the forum link on the home page). Posting may be done anonymously, it doesn't require creating an account, but anonymous posts must await approval from a moderator.