Re: don't gzip man files
At 1996-04-17 17:25, Guy Maor wrote:
> A global selection of man page compression sounds like a nice idea,
> except that someone has to implement it. I prefer to just gzip all the
> pages, obviously, as I'm the one that first proposed the notion.
>
> Trying to appease everyone is why Debian takes so long to release
> everyone. What governmental model are we using here? Oligarchy? Then
> Bruce and Ian and perhaps a few others can make the decision.
> Democracy? Then developers (ie - only people that maintain packages)
> can vote.
>
> I've only been involved with Debian a few months, but already I can see
> that anarchy is not the way to produce anything in a timely manner.
Guy is right about this. I'm the one who spoke up against compressed
manpages, but really, it doesn't matter a lot to me. My major concerns
were speed and compatibility. However, it's been shown that gunzip is
vastly more efficient than the CPU-hogging gzip; and since compressed
manpages is apparently not a Linuxism, I can accept it.
The best solution of all might be an install-manpage program, along the
lines of install-info. This would allow each user to have the option of
compressed source, uncompressed source, compressed preformatted only,
compressed source with uncompressed preformatted, &c. It would be easy to
tell what packages weren't using install-manpage by grepping
/var/lib/dpkg/info/*.list for /usr/man, so the transition wouldn't be too
painful.
However, whatever route is chosen, **it should not hold up 1.1**.
--
Shields, CrossLink.
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