Removal of catman from base

Gordon Tetlow gordon at tetlows.org
Tue Sep 12 18:42:05 UTC 2017


All,

I wanted to announce my intention to remove the catman utility.

For those that are unaware, this utility (disabled by default) is
generally run out of a periodic job and causes the system to cache
pre-formatted man pages into the /usr/share/man/cat* directories. With
modern hardware, it doesn't seem to be necessary to have pre-formatted
man pages as rendering them is short enough to not be noticeable.

Please note, this will not disable the ability to render cat pages or in
any other way use existing cat pages, it just removes the utility that
builds the cat pages. As such, any ports that install cat pages will
continue to work.

Best,
Gordon


More information about the freebsd-current mailing list