Re: our broken man package
Ethan Benson <erbenson@alaska.net>:
> IMO a setgid man with a group writable /var/catman is not any better
> then a mode 1777 /var/catman. (which is what slackware does btw)
> OpenBSD took another tack on this problem and just did away with
> cached man pages altogether. (no suid or sgid man)
They always re-format a manual page? This might be reasonable, actually.
Groff is pretty fast, and most manual pages are short, so it shouldn't
take too long even on older hardware.
And, anyway, caching might be done in a cronjob: look at the pages in
manpath every night, check which ones have been accessed since the past
run, and format those. Then delete anything older than N days in the
cache. When displaying, use the cached version only if it is newer than
the source.
This might simplify man a bit, actually.
On the other hand, we might want to copy the OpenBSD version instead
of maintaining our own man. But I leave that to whoever maintains the
packages.
--
Lars Wirzenius <liw@wapit.com>
Architect, Kannel WAP and SMS Gateway project, Wapit Ltd, http://www.kannel.org
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