Re: Proposal to remove catman(8)

[Tobias Nygren <tnn%NetBSD.org@localhost>]

On Mon, 9 Nov 2020 14:12:19 -0500 (EST)
Mouse <mouse%Rodents-Montreal.ORG@localhost> wrote:

> 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.

mandoc is used for everything that is in pkgsrc. For example:
$ mandoc /usr/pkg/man/man1/bash.1 | more

If you want to make the argument that it cannot render certain
third-party manual pages in way that makes the content intelligible you
must back it up with an actual example where the third-party software
ships a catpage. There are only 50 or so packages left that even ship
catpages.

-Tobias