man(1) oddity - was: HEADS UP: bzip2(1) compression for manpages...

[Ruslan Ermilov]

On Mon, May 19, 2003 at 11:01:00AM +1000, Andy Farkas wrote:
> On Fri, 16 May 2003, Ruslan Ermilov wrote:
> > On Fri, May 02, 2003 at 12:09:02PM +1000, Andy Farkas wrote:
> > >
> > > As a normal user, the "Formatting page, please wait..." message never
> > > appears, whereas it does for root.
> > >
> > > IMHO this is a mild POLA violation.
> > >
> > For a normal user, man(1) no longer creates the catpages.
> > This is still being revised (by me).
> 
> It still has to format the page. A user should be told this regardless if
> she is the superuser or not. ATM, only root gets a message.
> 
Not quite.  When catpages are created by man(1), the user is
displayed the text only after the whole catpage was created.
This can take some considerable time on large manpages and
slow machines.  When catpages are not created, the user is
displayed the text as soon as part of it becomes available
from the "/usr/bin/groff -S -Wall -mtty-char -man" command,
subject to the ${PAGER} buffering.


Cheers,
-- 
Ruslan Ermilov		Sysadmin and DBA,
ru at sunbay.com		Sunbay Software AG,
ru at FreeBSD.org		FreeBSD committer,
+380.652.512.251	Simferopol, Ukraine

http://www.FreeBSD.org	The Power To Serve
http://www.oracle.com	Enabling The Information Age
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