Re: our broken man package
Lars Wirzenius wrote:
> 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.
I think it would take a while on my 386 for things like the zshall man page.
(Several hundred pages of documentation.)
> And, anyway, caching might be done in a cronjob: look at the pagesa 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.
That's a good idea. Another route to take is to split man into the
rendering/caching bit and the command line man page lookup/processing/pager
executing bit. Only the former part of the program needs to run as user man,
and it could be a fairly small and more auditable peicve of code. This
would also happen to solve most of the reported bugs with the current
setup.
Though I think I like your idea better.
--
see shy jo
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