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Date:      Wed, 16 Jan 2002 16:09:37 -0500
From:      Garance A Drosihn <drosih@rpi.edu>
To:        Robert Watson <rwatson@FreeBSD.org>, Ruslan Ermilov <ru@FreeBSD.org>
Cc:        Joerg Wunsch <j@uriah.heep.sax.de>, arch@FreeBSD.org
Subject:   Re: cvs commit: src/gnu/usr.bin/man/man Makefile man.c src/etc/mtree BSD.local.dist BSD.usr.dist BSD.x11-4.dist BSD.x11.dist
Message-ID:  <p05101217b86b93b7e1cd@[128.113.24.47]>
In-Reply-To: <Pine.NEB.3.96L.1020116145639.73036A-100000@fledge.watson.org>
References:  <Pine.NEB.3.96L.1020116145639.73036A-100000@fledge.watson.org>

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   (I am bcc:-ing this to cvs-committers and cvs-all, with the idea
   that this discussion is also going on in freebsd-arch and thus we
   could drop it from those two cvs lists...)

At 3:00 PM -0500 1/16/02, Robert Watson wrote:
>I'm happy with the behavior being available and turned off by default,
>but personally my feeling is that the performance/correctness tradeoff
>leans towards correctness given the risk.  And to be honest, people
>don't usually benchmark systems based on the time it takes to render
>a man page.  :-)

But it is one of those things that will make the system "seem slower"
to them, in day-to-day use.

I think the security issue is a good enough reason to turn off the
current behavior of 'man', but I do wish there was some middle-ground
option which was between 'zero cat pages on disk' and 'automatically
generate all cat pages for all existing man pages'.

In my case, I have about a dozen man pages that I reference a lot, and
a lot of man pages that I never reference.  If something could keep
track of which pages were actually referenced a lot, then some system
daemon could generate cat-versions of just those man pages.

I realize that's probably a large hammer to be invoking to solve such
a little nail of a problem, but I couldn't help but wonder if there
was some other way to handle this.

-- 
Garance Alistair Drosehn            =   gad@eclipse.acs.rpi.edu
Senior Systems Programmer           or  gad@freebsd.org
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute    or  drosih@rpi.edu

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