announcing mdoc.su, a deterministic man-page URL shortener

["Constantine A. Murenin" <cnst%NetBSD.org@localhost>]

Dear NetBSD,

I would like to announce and introduce http://mdoc.su/ , 
a deterministic URL shortener for BSD manual pages, 
written entirely in nginx.conf.

It supports several address schemes, for example:

http://mdoc.su/NetBSD/3X11/XFree
http://mdoc.su/netbsd/macppc/4/intro
http://mdoc.su/n/intro.4.macppc
http://mdoc.su/n/mdoc.7
http://mdoc.su/n/curl

Source code for the whole mdoc.su.nginx.conf is available at:
https://github.com/cnst/mdoc.su
https://bitbucket.org/cnst/mdoc.su

Specifically, the following currently (as of 2013-02-17) controls 
NetBSD rewriting, and best describes the access scheme for NetBSD:

        location /NetBSD {      rewrite ^/NetBSD(/.*)?$ /n$1;   }
        location /n {
                set     $nb     "http://netbsd.gw.com/cgi-bin/man-cgi?";;
                rewrite ^/netbsd(/.*)?$ /.$1;
                rewrite ^/./([a-z]+[0-9]*[kx]?)/([^/]+)/([^/]+)$        $nb$3+$2.$1     redirect;
                rewrite ^/./([^/]+)/([^/]+)$            $nb$2+$1        redirect;
                rewrite ^/./([^/]+)\.([1-9]\.[a-z]+[0-9]*[kx]?)$        $nb$1+$2        redirect;
                rewrite ^/./([^/]+)\.([1-9])$           $nb$1+$2        redirect;
                rewrite ^/./([^/]+)$                    $nb$1   redirect;
                rewrite ^/./?$  /       last;
                return  404;
        }

Basically, "/NetBSD" and "/netbsd" are rewritten to "/n" internally 
(with no extra reply to the user), and then the rest of the URI is 
analysed, and a "302 Found" redirect is finally issued to the user.

Pages like http://mdoc.su/n/ redirect to the main "/" page internally, 
without affecting the URL that's visible to the user, making it easier 
to keep as a starting page specifically for one BSD.

Comments and suggestions are very welcome.  I've noticed there is an 
inconsistency between the available sections on these man-cgi scripts 
and the actual data that they can access:  for example, only "X11R6" 
is listed on NetBSD's man-cgi, not "3X11", and, likewise, 3p is missing 
from OpenBSD's man.cgi, although http://mdoc.su/o/sort.3p works great.  
It would be nice if people more familiar with the organisation of 
manual pages would provide some insights on restricting or relaxing the 
current rewrites to be more conforming.

Also, is there a preferred method of referring to a certain page through a URL?  

What looks better:  mdoc.su/n/8/envstat  or  mdoc.su/n/envstat.8 ?  
Although the "/8/sysctl" style seems to be more popular with various 
static man-page collections and web-sites, and is potentially more flexible, 
especially for NetBSD, I nonetheless think that for the simple [1-9] sections 
the "/sysctl.8" style looks better and more familiar.

P.S. Mail-Followup-To: NetBSD-Docs%NetBSD.org@localhost.

Best regards,
Constantine.