Date: Mon, 21 Jan 2002 18:54:02 -0500 (EST) From: Robert Watson <rwatson@FreeBSD.org> To: Nate Williams <nate@yogotech.com> Cc: cvs-committers@FreeBSD.org, cvs-all@FreeBSD.org, 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: <Pine.NEB.3.96L.1020121183943.69509T-100000@fledge.watson.org> In-Reply-To: <15436.42142.53176.44467@caddis.yogotech.com>
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On Mon, 21 Jan 2002, Nate Williams wrote: > > > Not in this forum. But we're not typical of the user base. I will > > > continue to use catman, probably making it world writeable, since in my > > > situation this isn't a compromise. But what about the man in the > > > street? > > > > The difference between the developers and the users is that the users > > hardly ever change the man pages, and so would probably benefit most from > > simply using the catman pages in a pregenerated form, rather than having > > to wait for each page to render the first time they read it, gradually > > consuming more and more disk space as they read more manpages. > > Except that this doesn't allow the 'users' to print out the pages in a > form that may be more usable by them. > > For example, for most manpages, I simply type 'man', but sometimes I > want to print out the manpage on my printer, so I create a postscript > file that is formatted better, and prints out much nicer than the > tradional 'dumb terminal' manpage that is created by default as the > catpage. This doesn't preclude having the nroff sources installed also, I'm just pointing out that the argument that it's in the user's best interest to use the man cache mechanism seems a bit bogus to me. The intended goal of the man cache was presumably to avoid the full disk cost of catman pages, while attempting also to avoid the cpu cost of processing the page every time it's viewed. However, in practice it has become a security/space tradeoff: you sacrifice security to conserve a few megabytes of space in catman files. I think that the benefit may once have been there, but I think on modern systems that it's really not there. For compatibility purposes, it might be reasonable to install man non-setuid, but still have the cat pages and directories be installed as the man user. Then twiddling man to setuid man from bin/bin would still work for those wanting to enable it. However, for the default install, we should either rely purely on nroff source, or also install the catman distribution. Robert N M Watson FreeBSD Core Team, TrustedBSD Project robert@fledge.watson.org NAI Labs, Safeport Network Services To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe cvs-all" in the body of the message
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