Re: Proposal to remove catman(8)

[Mouse <mouse%Rodents-Montreal.ORG@localhost>]

> I propose to remove catman(8).
> [and all other forms of support for preformatted manpages]

Personally, I would consider that a mistake.

The major use I make of them - besides speed - is reading manpages out
of a directory in some unexpected corner of the filesystem.  I have
found it far easier to "less /some/where/unexpected/program.cat1" than
to try to bludgeon man(1) into understanding that there are manpages
over in /some/where/unexpected.

As for mandoc(1), I haven't looked at it...but I question how well it
can work.  While I don't see them often, I do occasionally see manpages
(for third-party software, to be sure[%]) containing code that looks to
me like small bits of *roff hackery.  To make mandoc support such
things properly would have to amount to reimplementing nroff; the
alternative is to "oh, yeah, our man(1) doesn't really understand
nroff, only the markup *our* manpages use, sorry, it won't handle your
manpage that elsewhere, and historically, works just fine".

[%] Nothing in the OS, of course.  And nothing of my own; I don't
    really know nroff/troff, so I'm not competent to drop down into it
    when writing manpages.

>  - cat pages are not generated by default since 2012 and almost
>     nobody (except me?) used them in the past few years.

2012?  The only reason I haven't noticed and complained about this is
that (a) I don't run anything past 5.2 on my own machines and (b) at
work, where we use 8.0 and 9.1, we run them on grossly overmuscled
machines where the reformatting penalty is small enough to not be a
major problem.

I suppose this just means that modern NetBSD is, in yet another way,
demonstrating inappropriateness for the kind of tasks I want an OS for.

>  - This tool was removed from other BSDs by default and catman is not
>     a part AFAICT of any Unix specification.

"All the other kids are doing it" has got to be one of the worst
reasons to do anything.  IMO the propsal should be considered on its
merits, not on its popularity.

>  - Passing the documentation through mandoc(1) enables dynamic
>     customization, while cat(1) cannot do much or anything as it
>     operates on pre-generated .txt files.

I don't know what kind of "dynamic customization" you have in mind, but
in my limited exposure to other man(1) implementations, my concern with
such things has generally been how to turn them off.

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