Date: Tue, 12 Sep 2017 12:17:07 -0700 (PDT) From: Lyndon Nerenberg <lyndon@orthanc.ca> To: Poul-Henning Kamp <phk@phk.freebsd.dk> Cc: Gordon Tetlow <gordon@tetlows.org>, current@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Removal of catman from base Message-ID: <alpine.BSF.2.21.1709121210140.54096@orthanc.ca> In-Reply-To: <77524.1505242222@critter.freebsd.dk> References: <20170912184200.GD99742@gmail.com> <77524.1505242222@critter.freebsd.dk>
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> That was actually not why catman was brought into the world: ATT/USL > thought text-processing was The Goods so they unbundled it base SVR > and invented catman to make up for the missing nroff. Not quite. They (AT&T) sold the rights to sell typeset manuals to some publishing house (I forget which), at which point they stopped shipping the *roff source for the manpages on the source tapes. Instead, you got pre-formatted "cat" pages on the source tape. I think this happened starting with SVR3. catman(1) was always about doing bulk nroff runs against the whole of /usr/man, because, back in the day, running nroff on demand was slow. Even on a 785. (catman without nroff would have been a no-op.) --lyndon
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