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Date:      Sun, 19 Sep 1999 22:58:21 -0600
From:      Brett Glass <brett@lariat.org>
To:        Wes Peters <wes@softweyr.com>
Cc:        Matthew Dillon <dillon@apollo.backplane.com>, Greg Lewis <glewis@trc.adelaide.edu.au>, Evren Yurtesen <yurtesen@ispro.net.tr>, freebsd-security@FreeBSD.ORG, Nik Clayton <nik@FreeBSD.ORG>
Subject:   Re: Documentation of security features
Message-ID:  <4.2.0.58.19990919223803.047ba320@localhost>
In-Reply-To: <37E5B95D.34FAFA61@softweyr.com>
References:  <37E21A0A.1075F204@ispro.net.tr> <4.2.0.58.19990917092237.044f3f00@localhost> <37E2C9B0.BD5846BB@softweyr.com> <4.2.0.58.19990919085106.047a5ce0@localhost>

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At 10:34 PM 9/19/99 -0600, Wes Peters wrote:

>No, Brett, you're completely, totally, and utterly wrong here:

Actually, I was looking in the wrong place. I was in the
"cat1" directory instead of the "man1" directory. But what I
found still matters; see below.

>As you can see, all of the above are links to the same man page.  They
>do not take up any space, other than the i-node, and they certainly
>cannot get out of sync with one another.

The originals can't, but the cached, formatted versions of the pages
can. That's where the synchronization problems and unnecessary duplication
are occuring, as it turns out. What's more, there are more cache misses;
time is wasted reformatting pages that would otherwise been available
right away. A LOT of time, since groff is as slow as molasses in winter.

There's a pretty easy fix, though. Turn the hard links into symlinks (I
can't do this, but a committer can). Then, make man recognize symlinks 
and follow them to their sources before opening a page. (This can be done
as a one-line loop, or, to avoid problems with circular references,
dereference only once.) Problem solved, and we can start adding links 
for things like "securelevel" without cluttering the cache.

 > Welcome to UNIX, dude.

Thanks for the welcome, but you're a tad late. I first used UNIX in 1977. ;-)

--Brett



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