Joerg Sonnenberger wrote:
> 
> I think we have three different situations here:
> (a) Platforms which build catpages internally or don't use them at all.
> DragonFly and FreeBSD belong into the former, Plan9 would fall into the
> latter (no comments).
> (b) Platforms which use catpages only and have the proper tools
> installed already (troff/groff).
> (c) Platforms which use catpages only and *don't* have the tools for
> formating them.
> 
> For (a), we just should remove all created catpages on deinstall time.
> For (b), post-install can run troff/groff with the platform default
> settings even as part of the bootstrap.
> Do we have examples for (c) and do we care strong enough about that?
> Most of the tree won't work correctly for that in the current situation.

Some platforms simply do not have the tools.  Jeremy Reed's Linux 
distribution built around pkgsrc does not.  Neither does any 
Linux-From-Scratch installation.  The common feature here is a minimal 
installation of the operating system.  It is not hard to create such a 
minimal NetBSD installation either for special purposes.

I've been fairly consistent in trying to provide ways for pkgsrc to 
provide tools that are missing on some platforms.  Thomas Klausner has 
recently added a package option to the groff package to build with few 
or no dependencies so that it may be used as a low-level tool 
dependency.  You should expect that the tools for formatting man pages 
will be installed, either in the present or eventually, on platforms for 
which those tools are missing.

Which brings us back to what happens for bootstrap-installed packages, 
which by definition are built and installed before pkgsrc can used.  I 
think we should provide formatted catman pages in the distribution and 
install them as well, at the very least in the case where the packages 
are indeed installed via bootstrap.

	Cheers,

	-- Johnny Lam <jlam@pkgsrc.org>