Re: Removal of catman from base

[Bob Bishop]

Hi,

> On 12 Sep 2017, at 22:20, Poul-Henning Kamp  wrote:
> 
> 
> In message , Lyndon Nerenberg 
> writes:
>>> 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) 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.

That is correct. We wrote some excruciatingly ugly scripts that mostly 
reconstructed the *roff source from the formatted pages.

> I'm pretty sure that SVR1 had catman and roff was an extra and somewhat
> pricey software package.

That is also correct: by SVR5 that had become the Documenter’s Workbench (DWB).

> -- 
> Poul-Henning Kamp   | UNIX since Zilog Zeus 3.20
> p...@freebsd.org | TCP/IP since RFC 956
> FreeBSD committer   | BSD since 4.3-tahoe
> Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence.
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--
Bob Bishop
r...@gid.co.uk




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Re: Removal of catman from base

[Poul-Henning Kamp]

In message 
, Warner 
Losh writes:

>Back in school, our SunOS 3, SunOS 4 and VAX running BSD 4.{2,3} we had to
>run a special ditroff [...]

ditroff = Device Independent Troff

The original troff were hardwired to the C/A/T photo-typesetter which
by the time of SVR bare existed in the market anymore.

Ditroff took a configfile and emitted a documented output, which a
device-dependent postprocessor would convert into something the
actual hardware understood.

I think I wrote about a dozen ditroff config+preprocessor combos during
the late 1980ies.


-- 
Poul-Henning Kamp   | UNIX since Zilog Zeus 3.20
p...@freebsd.org | TCP/IP since RFC 956
FreeBSD committer   | BSD since 4.3-tahoe
Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence.
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Re: Removal of catman from base

[Warner Losh]

On Tue, Sep 12, 2017 at 4:48 PM, Lyndon Nerenberg  wrote:

> On Tue, 12 Sep 2017, Poul-Henning Kamp wrote:
>
> I'm pretty sure that SVR1 had catman and roff was an extra and somewhat
>> pricey software package.
>>
>
> The SVR1 (and 2) systems I had access to were all CTIX, and it shipped
> with nroff/troff.  And the 3B4000 & 3B2s I used later (SVR2 and later) also
> had nroff/troff.
>
> Maybe you're thinking of ditroff (Device Independent Troff) that was sold
> for gobs of $$$ through the AT Toolchest.  Certainly none of the SVRx
> machines I used shipped with ditroff.  I don't even think ditroff was on
> our 3B2 SVR3 source tapes.
>
> But I very clearly recall the absense of manpage source on that SVR3 tape.
> I remember howling bloody murder at AT Canada over that.  This was at
> Athabasca University - a distance education institution.  We typeset all
> our own course materials (using Softquad's sqtroff), and not being able to
> include properly typeset manpages with the course documentation (especially
> reflecting our local modifications to the systems) made me ... grumpy.


Back in school, our SunOS 3, SunOS 4 and VAX running BSD 4.{2,3} we had to
run a special ditroff to use the Imagen laser printer. And it was a special
deal that came with the printer to support document creation on the Unix
boxes. I don't know if it was an extra cost item for the Imagen printer or
not, but it wasn't part of the base system.

Warner
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Re: Removal of catman from base

[Lyndon Nerenberg]

On Tue, 12 Sep 2017, Poul-Henning Kamp wrote:


I'm pretty sure that SVR1 had catman and roff was an extra and somewhat
pricey software package.


The SVR1 (and 2) systems I had access to were all CTIX, and it shipped 
with nroff/troff.  And the 3B4000 & 3B2s I used later (SVR2 and later) 
also had nroff/troff.


Maybe you're thinking of ditroff (Device Independent Troff) that was sold 
for gobs of $$$ through the AT Toolchest.  Certainly none of the SVRx 
machines I used shipped with ditroff.  I don't even think ditroff was on 
our 3B2 SVR3 source tapes.


But I very clearly recall the absense of manpage source on that SVR3 tape. 
I remember howling bloody murder at AT Canada over that.  This was at 
Athabasca University - a distance education institution.  We typeset all 
our own course materials (using Softquad's sqtroff), and not being able to 
include properly typeset manpages with the course documentation 
(especially reflecting our local modifications to the systems) made me ... 
grumpy.


--lyndon

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Re: Removal of catman from base

[Poul-Henning Kamp]

In message , Lyndon Nerenberg 
writes:
>> 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) 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.

I'm pretty sure that SVR1 had catman and roff was an extra and somewhat
pricey software package.

-- 
Poul-Henning Kamp   | UNIX since Zilog Zeus 3.20
p...@freebsd.org | TCP/IP since RFC 956
FreeBSD committer   | BSD since 4.3-tahoe
Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence.
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Re: Removal of catman from base

[Lyndon Nerenberg]

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) 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

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Re: Removal of catman from base

[Poul-Henning Kamp]

In message <20170912184200.gd99...@gmail.com>, Gordon Tetlow writes:

>With modern hardware, it doesn't seem to be necessary to have pre-formatted
>man pages as rendering them is short enough to not be noticeable.

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.

-- 
Poul-Henning Kamp   | UNIX since Zilog Zeus 3.20
p...@freebsd.org | TCP/IP since RFC 956
FreeBSD committer   | BSD since 4.3-tahoe
Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence.
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Re: Removal of catman from base

[Gordon Tetlow]

On Tue, Sep 12, 2017 at 06:50:22PM +, Poul-Henning Kamp wrote:
> 
> In message <20170912184200.gd99...@gmail.com>, Gordon Tetlow writes:
> 
> >With modern hardware, it doesn't seem to be necessary to have pre-formatted
> >man pages as rendering them is short enough to not be noticeable.
> 
> 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.

Okay, that seems reasonable. I don't think it changes the desire to
remove it (unless I'm missing something).

Gordon
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Re: Removal of catman from base

[Gordon Tetlow]

On Tue, Sep 12, 2017 at 11:42:00AM -0700, Gordon Tetlow wrote:
> All,
> 
> I wanted to announce my intention to remove the catman utility.
> 
> For those that are unaware, this utility (disabled by default) is
> generally run out of a periodic job and causes the system to cache
> pre-formatted man pages into the /usr/share/man/cat* directories. With
> modern hardware, it doesn't seem to be necessary to have pre-formatted
> man pages as rendering them is short enough to not be noticeable.
> 
> Please note, this will not disable the ability to render cat pages or in
> any other way use existing cat pages, it just removes the utility that
> builds the cat pages. As such, any ports that install cat pages will
> continue to work.

I forgot to mention this has a review out:
https://reviews.freebsd.org/D12317

Gordon
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Removal of catman from base

[Gordon Tetlow]

All,

I wanted to announce my intention to remove the catman utility.

For those that are unaware, this utility (disabled by default) is
generally run out of a periodic job and causes the system to cache
pre-formatted man pages into the /usr/share/man/cat* directories. With
modern hardware, it doesn't seem to be necessary to have pre-formatted
man pages as rendering them is short enough to not be noticeable.

Please note, this will not disable the ability to render cat pages or in
any other way use existing cat pages, it just removes the utility that
builds the cat pages. As such, any ports that install cat pages will
continue to work.

Best,
Gordon
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