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



>>> 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.

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