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