Re: Gzipping man files

[Mark Eichin <eichin@cygnus.com>]

> Wait, why is this?  Does any other major Unix do this?  Won't this just be
> another Linuxism?

Actually, IRIX (and probably other SVR4's) *pack* source
manpages. (pack, if you recall, used the .z extension, back in the
late 70's :-) and was the reason gzip ended up going with .gz.)

I think they pack the "cat" pages too. 

gunzip itself is in fact very fast.

> slow down other things.  And disk space is *so* cheap these days that it's
> not worth it for a directory tree that is only a few megs large.

Sure it's cheap -- but I can't put any more disk on my home machine
(it's already got 4 IDE disks, and no slots left for a scsi
controller) and outside of the newest $5K laptops, you can't put more
than one hard disk in a laptop, and even then you're stuck at 800M or
maybe 1000M... having the man pages gzip'ed makes it that much easier
to justify installing the documentation for *everything*.

And, as has been mentioned, we already gzip info pages, and you don't
even notice (because both info readers, "info" and "emacs", handle it...)