Removal of catman from base

[Bob Bishop]

Hi,

> On 12 Sep 2017, at 22:20, Poul-Henning Kamp <phk at phk.freebsd.dk> wrote:
> 
> --------
> In message <alpine.BSF.2.21.1709121210140.54096 at orthanc.ca>, Lyndon Nerenberg writes:
>>> 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.

That is correct. We wrote some excruciatingly ugly scripts that mostly reconstructed the *roff source from the formatted pages.

> I'm pretty sure that SVR1 had catman and roff was an extra and somewhat
> pricey software package.

That is also correct: by SVR5 that had become the Documenter’s Workbench (DWB).

> -- 
> Poul-Henning Kamp       | UNIX since Zilog Zeus 3.20
> phk at FreeBSD.ORG         | TCP/IP since RFC 956
> FreeBSD committer       | BSD since 4.3-tahoe    
> Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence.
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--
Bob Bishop
rb at gid.co.uk