Removal of catman from base
Lyndon Nerenberg
lyndon at orthanc.ca
Tue Sep 12 19:17:08 UTC 2017
> That was actually not why catman was brought into the world: ATT/USL
> thought text-processing was The Goods so they unbundled it base SVR
> and invented catman to make up for the missing nroff.
Not quite. They (AT&T) sold the rights to sell typeset manuals to some
publishing house (I forget which), at which point they stopped shipping
the *roff source for the manpages on the source tapes. Instead, you got
pre-formatted "cat" pages on the source tape. I think this happened
starting with SVR3.
catman(1) was always about doing bulk nroff runs against the whole of
/usr/man, because, back in the day, running nroff on demand was slow.
Even on a 785. (catman without nroff would have been a no-op.)
--lyndon
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