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

[Giorgos Keramidas]

On 2007-11-04 05:03, Jeremy Chadwick <koitsu at freebsd.org> wrote:
> 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).

I think this is worth more investigation.  The source of man(1)
is contributed GNU-licensed code, but I'll see how hard it is to
implement an option like:

    MK_MAN_CATMAN_SUPPORT = "no"

which when turned on disables the related feature of man(1).