Offline docs, tutorial or API
I regularly have to work for extended periods offline. Is there a reasonable way to download and browse (e.g. easy searching, etc.) ros docs, api refs, tutorials and maybe even the wiki? I primarily am working with rospy
, but obviously need docs on the core as well.
Here are some things that I've considered or tried:
Download: mirror the website following instructions here or here
View: Run a local webserver (not sure how to make this work, but I could probably figure it out) Problems: Requires way to much storage space and bandwidth (>150GB according to the second link?!). Also, the instructions given in the first link don't work for the wiki. Thersync
command for the docs seemed to be working, but I cancelled after I got over 5 GB worth of downloads with no end in sight. Thersync
command for the wiki only got a few mb of stuff, and nothing useful from what I can tell.Download: A prepackaged docset such as this one
View: Usezeal
ordash
Problems: Doesn't includerospy
or tutorials, and seems pretty out of date.Download: When connected, open up a bunch of tabs to all the tutorials, etc. I think I might need, and just don't ever close them or shutdown (this is what I'm currently living off of pending a better solution). Obviously I could do a littler better by using an browser extension to facilitate offline caching, or copying all the links into a text file and using a script to wget offline links or something.
View: Browser Problem: Tedious and inevitably incomplete.I have to anticipate what topics I may be using. I'm currently learning ROS, and I frequently have to search for stuff, so this isn't going to work super well.Download: Docstrings in python (they are 'built-in' - so good news is nothing additional needs to be downloaded!)
View: I've still never found a satisfactory way to browse python help docs (e.g. compared to nice searchable online versions), but I can get by withpydoc
and thehelp
command, along with tab completion inipython
. Problems: No tutorials/wiki. Only includes self documented python code (and the docs strings inrospy
are not always that great). Viewing/searching isn't super convenient.
By the way, I don't think I'm asking for the impossible - the entire stackoverflow posts archive can be had for less than 15GB, so something similar should be possible with the ROS wiki/tutorials, especially if I only care about one distro and one language. I'd even be willing to leave out images if necessary.
Any more suggestions?
Asked by argentum2f on 2020-05-06 18:02:09 UTC
Comments
the number you quote is for mirroring all the binary ROS packages for all releases of ROS, ever released (well, just about).
It's not for the documentation, nor the wiki.
Asked by gvdhoorn on 2020-05-07 07:26:45 UTC