Re: asn1parse & man warts

["James K. Lowden" <jklowden%schemamania.org@localhost>]

On Wed, 13 Jan 2016 18:14:42 -0500 (EST)
Mouse <mouse%Rodents-Montreal.ORG@localhost> wrote:

> > (Why does man write a status message to stderr by default?  It's
> > been 20 years since it was true, as the source code says, that
> > "this may take awhile".)
> 
> I have a manpage (for one of my own programs) that takes some 20
> seconds to nroff on my main desktop machine.  (time says "19.3u 0.6s
> 0:22.10 90.4% 0+0k 87+9io 74pf+0w" in a test I just did.)

Holy movable type, Batman!  The biggest manpage on my stock system is
c++.1, 901,945 bytes.  nroff renders it in 0.468 seconds; mandoc in
0.088 seconds.  On an amd64, yes, but unless your page is signficantly
larger, that means your "main desktop machine" is 40x slower, on the
order of 100 MHz (very roughly).  The last time I used a machine that
slow was before Bill Gates discovered the Internet.  

> Perhaps print the message if some suitable time (a second?) passes
> and nroff isn't done?  

Maybe just #ifdef based on architecture?  It's an anomalous,
unimportant message.  Other utilities don't warn when the operation may
"take awhile".  I guess the reason man was allowed to be different is
that the message disappears when the pager initializes the terminal.  

--jkl