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

[Andy Farkas]

On Mon, 19 May 2003, Ruslan Ermilov wrote:
> 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.

This is my point. A normal user isn't told whats happening anymore:

$ sysctl -a | grep kern.version
kern.version: FreeBSD 5.1-BETA #4: Sat May 17 14:23:21 EST 2003
$
$ find /usr/share/man/ -name "ppp.8*"
/usr/share/man/man8/ppp.8.gz
$
$ /usr/bin/time man ppp > /dev/null
***user waits here***
       11.57 real        11.35 user         1.26 sys
$
$ su -
Password:
#
# /usr/bin/time man ppp > /dev/null
Formatting page, please wait...***user waits here***Done.
       11.75 real        11.64 user         1.23 sys
#

A normal user has to wait staring at a flashing cursor for 11.5 seconds
before *anything* happens, but root is told "Formatting page, please
wait..."

Am I explaining it enough?

> 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.

If a catpage already exists, the `formatting` message does not appear
for any user.

--

 :{ andyf at speednet.com.au

        Andy Farkas
    System Administrator
   Speednet Communications
 http://www.speednet.com.au/