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