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

Andy Farkas wrote:
> On Mon, 19 May 2003, Daniel C. Sobral wrote:
> > Andy Farkas wrote:
> > >
> > > Arrghh. Why you not believe me when I have proved the user experience is
> > > different between 4.x and 5.x ?????
> >
> > He isn't denying that. He's just claiming these 10 seconds are not a
> > result of the man page being catpaged. Or, in other words, that the
> > "Formatting page, please wait..." message is *not* there because of
> > those 10 seconds wait, but for something else that actually takes no
> > time at all.
> 
> I am just trying to say that a (normal) users' experience is differnet
> between 4.x and 5.x. That is all.

Conducting a very quick and inaccurately timed experiment (counting
off the time in my head) appears to support Ruslan's argument:

-STABLE is a dual PIII-800
-CURRENT is a dual PII-266

1. On 4.8-STABLE 'rm /usr/share/man/cat8/ppp.8.gz', then as a user,
   'man ppp' I get the formatting message and about 4 seconds later,
   the page is displayed.
2. On 4.8-STABLE Subsequent 'man ppp' are quick.
3. On 4.8-STABLE timing is unchaged for root.
4. On 5.1-BETA (and slower machine) as a user 'man ppp' takes about
   2 seconds to display the first bit of the manual page in my pager.
5. On 5.1-BETA as a user subsequent 'man ppp' timing is unchanged.
6. On 5.1-BETA as root 'rm /usr/share/man/cat8/ppp.8.gz' and then
   'man ppp' gives the formatting message and about 10 seconds later
   the page is displayed.
7. On 5.1-BETA as root subsequent 'man ppp' is quick.
8. On 5.1-BETA as a user the existence of /usr/share/man/cat8/ppp.8.gz,
   or lack thereof, does not affect timing.

This is -CURRENT (-BETA) on May 15 this year.  Perhaps yours is a
different or earlier version of the source which is why you do not
see the behaviour Ruslan expects, or perhaps your pager does not
display anything before man has completely output the formatted
text.  The way that it works on my -CURRENT system, is sensible and
man displays output before it has completed processing and formatting
the page.  It responds quickly even though it is near jurasic
hardware so there is no need for the 'formatting...' message.  You
do however have to wait the full 10 seconds if you want to see the
end of the manual page.

Ian