reading manpages [was Re: Adding the "links" text mode web browser to the base system]

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

>>> That's more a reason to provide a smarter frontend than catpages.
>> Perhaps, but I for one would really really resist anything that
>> means I can't use my $PAGER of choice to read manpages.  [...]
> Don't worry too much.  Dropping cat pages doesn't affect whether or
> not you can use a custom $PAGER.

Then I misunderstood the context.  I thought this discussion was about
tools for looking at preformatted pages; I didn't realize that an
"nroff-alike enough for manpages but fast enough to format on the fly"
was on the table.

> In my opinion they are a waste of disk space as soon as the tools to
> format the manual pages are fast enough to make the pre-processing
> irrelevant.

Mostly agreed, and I think the reservations are outweighed by the other
benefits of reformatting on the fly.

> As snj@ commented on source-changes-d, even on a shark [...]

A shark?  Try an hp300.  Or a sun2.  Or the good old trusty
MicroVAX-II.  The shark is actually a moderately fast machine.

/~\ The ASCII                             Mouse
\ / Ribbon Campaign
 X  Against HTML                mouse%rodents-montreal.org@localhost
/ \ Email!           7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39  4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B