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

From: Ruslan Ermilov <ru_at_freebsd.org>
Date: Mon, 19 May 2003 20:22:59 +0300
On Mon, May 19, 2003 at 05:25:10PM +0200, Harti Brandt wrote:
> On Mon, 19 May 2003, Ruslan Ermilov wrote:
> 
> RE>On Mon, May 19, 2003 at 11:53:49AM -0300, Daniel C. Sobral wrote:
> RE>> Andy Farkas wrote:
> RE>> >
> RE>> >Arrghh. Why you not believe me when I have proved the user experience is
> RE>> >different between 4.x and 5.x ?????
> RE>>
> RE>> He isn't denying that. He's just claiming these 10 seconds are not a
> RE>> result of the man page being catpaged.
> RE>>
> RE>Right.
> RE>
> RE>> I do have a question... on these examples, does the cat page exist or
> RE>> not, for each?
> RE>>
> RE>It does not.  If it exists and is up-to-date, it's just uncompressed
> RE>(if it's compressed) and displayed.
> RE>
> RE>> And what happens in the other case (ie, if the cat page
> RE>> does not exist in these examples, what happens when it does exist)?
> RE>>
> RE>If the catpage does not exist, it's either created (if the user
> RE>has the write permission to the cat* directory) or the raw
> RE>manpage gets formatted, and the output is piped to the PAGER.
> RE>Piped, not ";"ed, hence no message.
> RE>
> RE>If we are to add the message, it should be "Formatting and
> RE>displaying the page, please wait..." which is silly (IMO).
> 
> You should try 'man sh' on an 166MHz Pentium, then you see that this
> is not silly... groff is a C++ monster and on slow machines takes quite a
> while even to grok the macros, not talking about spitting out the first
> page.
> 
No thanks.  I've been playing with 3.0-CURRENT on a 486 laptop,
and recall running "man ppp" took ages when it was creating a
catpage; "please wait..." didn't help.  But I also recall that
I knew that on a slow box things run slow, and I also recall
that not having catpages on that box gave me much better
interactive response times from man(1).


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

http://www.FreeBSD.org	The Power To Serve
http://www.oracle.com	Enabling The Information Age

Received on Mon May 19 2003 - 08:23:23 UTC

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