Date: Wed, 16 Jan 2002 15:42:10 +0100 From: Joerg Wunsch <j@uriah.heep.sax.de> To: Robert Watson <rwatson@FreeBSD.org> Cc: Greg Lehey <grog@FreeBSD.org>, Ruslan Ermilov <ru@FreeBSD.org>, cvs-committers@FreeBSD.org, cvs-all@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: <20020116154210.A74132@uriah.heep.sax.de> In-Reply-To: <Pine.NEB.3.96L.1020115224951.59548D-100000@fledge.watson.org>; from rwatson@FreeBSD.org on Tue, Jan 15, 2002 at 10:55:14PM -0500 References: <20020116132917.K78030@wantadilla.lemis.com> <Pine.NEB.3.96L.1020115224951.59548D-100000@fledge.watson.org>
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As Robert Watson wrote: > There's a > lot of risk involved here, not all that disimilar to the risk involved in > setuid suidperl. We turn that off by default, and users can always turn > it on if they need it. I'd wish we could also (optionally) turn suidness on again for man(1), in the same way it can be done for suidperl (i. e. via /etc/make.conf). For my usual home machine, security implications of someone clobbering my catpages aren't of concern to me, but i somewhat like the idea of a `catpage cache' (as opposed to always catmanning the entire tree). > We have a catman distribution already, I believe, which can be enabled in > sysinstall. Maybe it's time to make it part of the default install, if it > isn't already. I wouldn't do this. For CPUs with clocks in the Gigahertz range, it's not that hard to trade speed (reformat the page each time) against the space required by the catpages. Solaris doesn't store catpages, for example. I once created the catman distribution mainly with the idea in mind to save CPU time on slow machines. Owners of slow machines are then still free to install this distribution. The sad thing: it now might cause catfiles to become stale, if the luser installed more recent man pages. I hope man(1) is smart enough to handle that situation, and would reformat the more recent man source instead of displaying the stale catpage then. (Owners of slow machines probably won't like the idea much to re-catman the entire tree regularly.) -- cheers, J"org .-.-. --... ...-- -.. . DL8DTL http://www.sax.de/~joerg/ NIC: JW11-RIPE Never trust an operating system you don't have sources for. ;-) To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe cvs-all" in the body of the message
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