Re: man(1) oddity - was: HEADS UP: bzip2(1) compression for manpages...

On Mon, May 19, 2003 at 09:38:19PM +1000, Andy Farkas wrote:
> On Mon, 19 May 2003, Ruslan Ermilov wrote:
> > On Mon, May 19, 2003 at 09:26:26PM +1000, Andy Farkas wrote:
> > >
> > > Here is a table of what I *really* see:
> > >
> > > FreeBSD-4.8:
> > >             | no catpage     | catpage
> > > Normal user | fmt msg, waits | no msg, no wait
> > > Super user  | fmt msg, waits | no msg, no wait
> > >
> > > FreeBSD-5.1-B:
> > >
> > > Normal user | no msg, waits  | no msg, no wait
> > > Super user  | fmt msg, waits | no msg, no wait
> > >
> > >
> > > The difference is Normal user.
> > >
> > This example is wrong.  With your example you're timing the
> > formatting of the whole manpage, and I'm telling you that
> > normal man(1) invocation (with PAGER) will start showing you
> > something on your terminal much sooner.
> 
> No, thats what I *really* *see* without redirection or anything. Plain old
> `man ppp` command.  I only used the `> /dev/null` example because the same
> thing is experienced by the user.
> 
> Please boot up 5.1-B on a slow box and type 'man ppp'. You'll see what I
> mean then.
> 
Then realize what I've been trying to tell you: this is not the
problem of root vs. non-root, rather the message is only displayed
if we create a catpage, and we know we'll only display it to the
user after the whole manpage is formatted.  My example with
renaming cat8 was ought to hint you about this.

What are you proposing?  Should we display every action that
we're making?

In other words: THERE IS NOTHING TO WAIT FOR in the case when
a catpage is not created, man(1) already launches the command
that will display you the output; the fact that it's somewhat
slow is irrelevant here.  When, on the other hand, a catpage
is getting created, the command that displays the output is
NOT run immediately; rather, a "Please wait, formatting ..."
is displayed, the formatting is done (and the result is saved
to a .cat file), and only after that the command that shows
you the manpage (catpage) is run:

Scenario 1:		Scenario 2:
Please wait...,		format | display (simultaneously)
then format,
then display.


Cheers,
-- 
Ruslan Ermilov		Sysadmin and DBA,
ru_at_sunbay.com		Sunbay Software AG,
ru_at_FreeBSD.org		FreeBSD committer,
+380.652.512.251	Simferopol, Ukraine

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