Re: Proposal to remove catman(8)

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

On Mon, Nov 09, 2020 at 21:12:10 +0100, Tobias Nygren wrote:

> mandoc is used for everything that is in pkgsrc. For example:
> $ mandoc /usr/pkg/man/man1/bash.1 | more
>
> If you want to make the argument that it cannot render certain
> third-party manual pages in way that makes the content intelligible you
> must back it up with an actual example where the third-party software

Well, we don't even have to go to pkgsrc. E.g. groff_char(7) is
mangled by mandoc :)

But this is actually irrelevant, b/c mandoc(1) is not hardcoded in
man(1).  The choice of formatter is down to man.conf(5) and people can
still configure nroff as their man page formatter.  Or is that the
next thing you are going to take away?


> ships a catpage. There are only 50 or so packages left that even ship
> catpages.

This is also irrelevant.  This doesn't have anything to do with
whether packages do and don't ship cat pages.  If someone uses cat
pages they likely have a catman(8) invocation in their weekly or daily
cron job.

kre@ has already expressed it better than I could ever hope, so
please, can we stop this silly crusade?  How does catman(8) gets in
the way of someone who does NOT use cat pages?

Also, please revert the commit that removed the cat directories from
the tree.  This is overstepping the limits of the initial MKCATPAGES
proposal.

-uwe