Comment 1 for bug 163851

Thanks for your report.

The issue that you describe has the following problem:

The manpages are compressed in order to save diskspace. Therefore man must decompress the compressed manpage and in order to do so it must have an ability to write on a disk/filesystem of some kind. If your root filesystem is read-only that more likely than not it is because of an error that occurred while accessing this filesystem. It would be extremely difficult to make provisions for any possible configurations.

On the other hand. This is an exceptional situation in which usually only a trained system admin will try to do something. For such a person, it should be easy to mount /tmp to a writeable drive or even ramfs. In that moment man can work again.

Do you think that this procedure is acceptable in such a situation?

Thanks,