Re: Proposal to remove catman(8)

[Valery Ushakov <uwe%stderr.spb.ru@localhost>]

On Tue, Nov 10, 2020 at 23:31:12 +0100, Kamil Rytarowski wrote:

> On 10.11.2020 23:04, Robert Elz wrote:
> >     Date:        Tue, 10 Nov 2020 19:28:41 +0100
> >     From:        Kamil Rytarowski <kamil%netbsd.org@localhost>
> >     Message-ID:  <c4db1f9d-85ee-f90a-2ea0-c1a6448b39ca%netbsd.org@localhost>
>
> So you just confirmed to have a lot of opinions and just started to
> (re)learn how to use cat-pages at all...

Kamil, you keep confusing mechanism and policy.  This has been
repeated several times in this thread by at least myself and kre, but
you studiously ignore it:

  Support for catpages per-se (mechanism) does NOT prevent dynamic
  reformating that fits terminal width for people who wants that.

I'm at lost at how to formulate that any more explicitly.

With MKCATPAGES=no by default there are no catpages shipped (policy).
man foo doesn't find a catpage and invokes $whatever to format it from
source each time.  That $whatever is mandoc by default and if we teach
it to use terminal width of $MANWIDTH that's what it will do.  You
keep repeating that that's what you want to be the case by defaul, and
that will be the case by default.

People that for whatever reason want to use catpages can have them in
their cat* dirs and man(1) will show it to them instead of running the
formatter each time.  Presumably, people that want to use cat pages do
know what they are doing and know the tradeoffs.

It has been already pointed out that the reasons may be diverse and it
doesn't have to be all-or-nothing deal.  Someone can plop a few
catpages into the cat dir b/c the default formatter doesn't format
them correctly, or they don't have the source of the page, or
whatever.  Yes, they won't get the width-adpated page, but since they
made that non-default choice, why we should get in their way?  This
has been pointed out by kre already, but you just ignored it.

You keep saying catpages are in the way of MANWIDTH, and you are
repeatedly told they are not, and you ignore that and loop.


> I inform you that you were happy to render your cat page with mandoc(1).

Again, it has been repeatedly pointed out that mandoc doesn't have
anything to do with it.  You keep confusing mechanism and policy.


-uwe