[ On Thu, March 12, 1998 at 11:07:36 (-0800), Bill Studenmund wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: MAN/CAT in distributions
>
> Most of my systems are memory-bound, and I don't have laserprinters a
> pleanty. So the nroff ones are fine, and I'd love to keep the space for
> other stuff.

Nroff'ed manual pages often take more space than their sources (though I
don't know if that's true when you gzip both).

We're only talking about a very few megabytes total too....  If your
systems are that short of space then you're in big trouble anyway and
you'd probably be best off deleting /usr/share/man completely from those
systems and having documentation only on one reference machine.

On older hardware nroff can be a royal pain to wait for, so formatted
manual pages are nice to have when you're in a rush, but unless you're
going to store both and let man automatically update the formatted
copies the latter are not really worth the bits they're stored in since
the former are always sufficient and complete for either on-line viewing
or printing.

-- 
							Greg A. Woods

+1 416 443-1734			VE3TCP			robohack!woods
Planix, Inc. <woods@planix.com>; Secrets Of The Weird <woods@weird.com>