/usr/share/man/man8/MAKEDEV.8

[Jeremy Chadwick]

On Sun, Nov 04, 2007 at 02:10:40PM +0200, Alex Kozlov wrote:
> On Sat, Nov 03, 2007 at 01:48:54PM -0400, Andrew Lankford wrote:
> >   2) getting rid of catman and forcing man to generate a new one from 
> > scratch each time instead of filling up /usr/share/man/cat* with stale
> > files.  Is this going to be a big drain on a p4-era pc compared to 
> > something like another periodic.conf script?
> > 
> > or
> > 
> >   3) A compile or run-time option that disables catman as described above.
> > If I knew of one, I'd enable it without a second thought on my cutting
> > edge p3 desktop :)
> Put weekly_catman_enable="NO" in your /etc/periodic.conf

It defaults to "no".

Regardless, I think you miss Andrew's point.  AFAIK, there isn't any way
to disable automatic creation of catman pages when "man" is run as root.
Being able to disable that feature would ultimately solve this issue
for those of us who don't want it (this thread has already mentioned
the problems with it).

That said -- for those running on embedded systems or systems with small
amounts of disk, pre-formatted/catman pages are incredibly useful.

-- 
| Jeremy Chadwick                                    jdc at parodius.com |
| Parodius Networking                           http://www.parodius.com/ |
| UNIX Systems Administrator                      Mountain View, CA, USA |
| Making life hard for others since 1977.                  PGP: 4BD6C0CB |