man doesn't need to suggest I wait due to its reformatting.

[Ralph Corderoy]

Doing `man foo' still results in a

    Reformatting foo(1), please wait...

line on stderr despite the fact it's been years and years since
processing power was low enough to cause anyone to have to wait for
troff to format a man page.

It clutters stderr, is unnecessary, and we don't see

    gcc: preprocessing foo.h, please wait...
    gcc: compiling foo.c, please wait...

so could it please be laid to rest as an enhancement?

    $ sed -n 2623,2626p man-db-2.4.2/src/man.c
                            fprintf (stderr,
                                     _("Reformatting %s, please wait...\n"),
                                     title);
                            disp_cmd = make_display_command (NULL, title);
    $

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

Fair enough; I can see the argument here. I've committed this change upstream,
even though it will take me a while to get used to not being able to use this
message as an indicator that a cat page isn't being used. :-)

Fri Jul 8 13:12:29 BST 2005 Ralph Corderoy <email address hidden>

        * src/man.c (display): Drop "Reformatting %s, please wait..."
          message; it's been years since processing power was low enough for
          this to be relevant.

[Dennis Kaarsemaker (dennis)]

Still there in Dapper ;)

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

Correct, I haven't made a new upstream release yet. I should get round to that at some point.

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

We'll get this in gutsy (finally!) once we do the initial sync from Debian. Sorry for the delay.

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

man-db (2.4.4-1) experimental; urgency=low

  * New upstream release.
    - Drop "Reformatting %s, please wait..." message (LP: #18786,
      closes: #378781).
    - Fix "gditview" typo (closes: #317696).
    - Avoid splitting up a sentence into two translatable pieces
      (closes: #320111).
    - Add Russian translation of NAME (thanks, Yuri Kozlov;
      closes: #338991).
    - Fix mistaken use of .l instead of .I (thanks, Valéry Perrin;
      closes: #349208).
    - Add Danish translation of NAME (thanks, Henning Makholm;
      closes: #353959).
    - Skip "exec" at the start of a command, to make old configuration files
      work (closes: #353959).
    - Ignore SIGPIPE in child processes (closes: #387864).
    - Fail with an error message if argv is a character or block device, as
      we may well hang trying to read from it and it almost certainly isn't
      what the caller intended anyway (closes: #341706).
    - Teach lexgrog front-end about pages with multiple name/description
      pairs (closes: #342834).
    - Fix a slew of memory leaks, including a nasty per-search leak in
      apropos (closes: #368749).
    - Add cross-references to mandb in apropos and whatis documentation
      (thanks, Phil Endecott; closes: #388755).
    - Document man -X option (thanks, Sam Morris; closes: #360112).
    - Don't try to pass -X or -P-g options to eqn, only troff
      (closes: #327772).
    - Stop claiming that -d does not display any manual pages (thanks, Dan
      Jacobson; closes: #340910).
  * Policy version 3.7.2: no changes required.

 -- Colin Watson <email address hidden> Mon, 12 Feb 2007 12:45:53 +0000