That was actually not why catman was brought into the world: ATT/USL thought text-processing was The Goods so they unbundled it base SVR and invented catman to make up for the missing nroff.
Not quite. They (AT&T) sold the rights to sell typeset manuals to some publishing house (I forget which), at which point they stopped shipping the *roff source for the manpages on the source tapes. Instead, you got pre-formatted "cat" pages on the source tape. I think this happened starting with SVR3.
catman(1) was always about doing bulk nroff runs against the whole of /usr/man, because, back in the day, running nroff on demand was slow. Even on a 785. (catman without nroff would have been a no-op.)
--lyndon _______________________________________________ freebsd-current@freebsd.org mailing list https://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-current To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-current-unsubscr...@freebsd.org"
