2008/5/23 Stephen Hahn <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
> * Peter Tribble <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> [2008-05-23 21:34]:
>> On Sun, May 18, 2008 at 3:44 AM, Mike Gerdts <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>> > After I my recent putback of some enhancements to man (PSARC/2007/688)
>> > one of the comments I received was that now it would be nice if man
>> > pages were automatically indexed.  The best solution I have to this
>> > today is to run find to look for directories that look like they
>> > contain man pages then run "catman -w" against them.  Surely there is
>> > a better way.
>> >
>> > I was thinking that the better way would be to have a service similar
>> > to fc-cache that looked at the timestamps of man* and sman*
>> > directories subdirectories and compared them to the timestamp of the
>> > assocatiated windex files.
>>
>> Isn't the better way to get packages delivering manpages to deliver
>> preformatted manpages and their windex (or some index, at least),
>> and to have man just look at all the windex fragments? It seems
>> silly for every user to have to rebuild all this when it should be supplied
>> already done.
>
>  I think we could look at this improvement as well, but Mike's approach
>  also indexes man pages that arrive on the system via other means.
>  (This is one of the reasons we've been pushing update services.)

The one concern I have with this is the extra bandwidth. I know these
particular bits will probably compress well. However, in aggregate,
they are still a concern to me.

I know most US users don't care about the extra bits, but my sojourns
in Australia had me counting every kilobyte I downloaded while I was
there. I would personally be more than willing to trade the processing
time for generating these in exchange for my allotted bandwidth.

I would hope that we could adapt the system such that it could
generate them if they were not present, and bandwidth-conscious users
could opt via ips filtering to not download such items.

Filtering, to me, is a big differentiator between ips and other
systems; other systems differentiate by packages which means users are
at the mercy of the package maintainers when it comes to bandwidth. I
realise that they will still be when it comes to the filtering
tags/attributes. However, I believe package maintainers will be more
inclined to maintain tags/attributes than separate packages.

-- 
Shawn Walker

"To err is human -- and to blame it on a computer is even more so." -
Robert Orben
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