Re: Proposal to remove catman(8)

[Robert Elz <kre%munnari.OZ.AU@localhost>]

    Date:        Tue, 10 Nov 2020 00:05:32 +0100
    From:        Kamil Rytarowski <kamil%netbsd.org@localhost>
    Message-ID:  <c1ef7af4-c413-667a-464c-b40393cac2d9%netbsd.org@localhost>

  | Do you use it? Do you know anybody who uses it on NetBSD-current?

I might start.   Particularly for the pages that mandoc can't format properly.

  | I don't trust that these people are tracking or using -current that used
  | to have broken MKCATPAGES.

That's irrelevant, no-one is complaining about that being removed.  Don't
you understand the difference?

  | html pages are not integrated in man.conf(5) or man(1). cat pages are
  | integrated and preferred over man pages.

What the default man.conf should contain is another issue which can
be discussed.   Aside from that it would be dumb to have it refer to
catN/* pages if the catman command were to no longer exist, that's
a completely separate question from removing catman(8).

And in any case, if you don't generate the cat pages, then "preferred
over man pages" is harmless, is it not?   Or is your "man" command somehow
not working when the cat pages don't exist?

But we do apparently generate some html pages, I have that trash in my
/usr/share/man directory for no apparent reason - I don't run any kind of
web server, so no-one can view them that way, and while I suppose I could
point a file:///usr/share... URL at some browser, I cannot think of a
single reason I'd ever want to do that (if I were to have some fetish for
HTML formatted man pages, I'd look for them on the web, not on my system).

  | Sorry, but MKCATPAGES was constantly broken AFAIR even in releases until
  | I stepped in.

Once again, completely irrelevant, MKCATPAGES is not the only way to
generate the cat files (which have been around much longer than the
NetBSD build system).   Forget MKCATPAGES, that's gone, and no-one is
likely to miss it.

  | It's not a selling point to any regular user, born after A.D. 2000 to
  | optimize reading man pages.

If the only thing we leave in NetBSD is "selling points" then we may
as well all stop now.   What will be left will be useless for anything.

And how exactly are all these young users ever going to even notice
that cat pages exist (or might exist)?

  | Reduce dead cruft.

It isn't dead, just old.

  | Compatibility with other systems

Huh?   How are we incompatible?   And if we become that compatible,
what would be the point of existing at all?  We'd just be FreeBSD
(or whatever) with the name misspelled.

  | and reduce frustration of users (I've received the complains)

Send some, or even better, have the people who complained send something,
so we can understand what the real problem (if there is one) and perhaps
work out a rational course of action - something less than scorched earth,
to fix things.

  | who are forced to hack the default install and/or tools
  | to behave like intended.

What isn't behaving as intended?   And who defines what that is?

Is it perhaps possible that you have been doing builds with MKCATPAGES
turned on, and distributing the results, and that is causing frustration
amongst some users who received that distribution from you?   If that
happens to be the issue, surely all you need to do is to stop doing that
(and now that MKCATPAGES is gone, that's kind of the only choice).

Aside from that, how would anyone ever be affected by catman, or are
you worried about a bunch of empty directories in /usr/share/man or the
cost of /usr/sbin/catman (for me, about 24KB) or /usr/chare/man/man8/catman.8
(about 3.4KB).

  | Sorry to repeat, but as MKCATPAGES was constantly broken, unless I
  | committed changes in the past ~5 years, nobody used that any more on
  | anything, possibly in more than a decade.

And once again, this is irrelevant.   I am going to stop saying this now.
Every time you mention MKCATPAGES you are showing that you have no real
argument.

  | cat pages cannot be fixed easily.

They don't need fixing.   They may not be able to support something
new that you want, but that's OK, you keep saying that no-one uses them,
so that they don't support whatever it is isn't going to bother anyone.

  | If someone wants to pass them through
  | mandoc and reformat, I would consider it as a waste of time.

If people want to do what you consider wasting their time, how exactly
does that hurt you (or anyone else) ?

  | Being old is not the concern, but being non-trivial for reformatting.

Then don't reformat them.   Perhaps if someone is asking for that,
then just ignore any cat pages that exist.   Or perhaps we can embed
the width and height in the file names, so they're used if they
happen to exist in the correct form, and not otherwise (and so they
can be generated for any layout that anyone believes they will use).

  | I prefer to avoid FreeBSD-style hacks that silently disable cat pages
  | behind the scenes. Better option in 2020 is to just forget them entirely.

You are welcome to forget them.   You are not welcome to delete support.

  | Introducing features that utilize mandoc, but the first step is to drop
  | cat-pages put their feet in the door. Preformatting cat pages is a dead
  | concept.

The latter I understand, so don't do that.   You don't have to delete
all support for cat pages to make that happen - whatever you are doing.

  | I remind you that we already reduce unused features from our userland.

Yes, when something truly is useless, and we all agree to that.

  | For example patch(1) had removed SCCS support silently,

That probably shouldn't have happened.   But patch is code imported
from upstream, right?   That has other considerations.

  | I sense a general difference in the view point. We are apparently
  | trading better performance on a historical computer in possibly
  | non-existent setup anymore in two or more decades + frustrating users vs
  | good user experience on anything modern, customizable and compatible
  | with other OSs.

I fail to see any frustration (other than this useless debate), or any
way that could even happen in a default setup.

  | But then, it's possible to keep old catman and catpages for those who
  | want it

Yes.

  | and defer this to pkgsrc.

Why?   The part that you're most complaining about (I really cannot see
what harm /usr/sbin/catman can possibly do to someone unsuspecting) would
need to remain anyway, the man command needs to be able to read cat pages
if the user has created them.   I am assuming that you're not proposing
moving the man command to pkgsrc by that remark?

  | Do I fulfill the needs of these extinct users by this move?

Just leave cat page support alone.  Ignore it.   Do that and it will ignore
you, and everyone will be happy.

And stop hunting for other things to remove.

kre