Okay, I would still argue it is useless. But I guess it is part of the UNIX fetish :)
-- Olivier Duclos On Mon, Nov 9, 2026, at 19:17, Thor Lancelot Simon wrote: > On Sat, Nov 07, 2026 at 10:45:57AM +0100, Olivier Duclos wrote: >> Hello, >> >> I propose to remove the message "man: Formatting manual page..." that we get >> each time we call man. > > This warning is emitted only when preformatted manual pages are not > installed. It lets users who are, in fact, on slow systems know why they > are waiting -- because even on such systems, if the cat pages are installed, > rendering is instantaneous. > > I'm pretty sure this dates back at least to 4.3BSD and possibly past that.
