Re: don't gzip man files
quinlan@best.com (Daniel Quinlan) wrote on 17.04.96 in <199604171932.MAA13794@shellx.best.com>:
> > 2. Increase speed. (It does so on my system, and at least one other
> > person has reported so in this forum).
>
> I doubt it. You probably either forgot to invalidate your cache
> between runs or your disk drive is very inadequate for your processor.
Hmm. I definitely remember people were surprised by exactly this effect
when the first executable file compressors came around.
> I never claimed that uncompressed manual pages were faster, just that
> putting compressed manual pages in packages was a bad idea.
I don't think a problem with compressed man pages has been shown yet.
> Then some packages will have compressed manuals and some won't. With
> my proposal of using dpkg or some such to handle compressing pages,
> people only have to upgrade dpkg -- nothing else. To make it really
Also, someone will have to implement it. I do see a problem there.
> Disk space costs about 20 or 30 cents per MB.
Unfortunately, you can't go to the store and buy $2.00 worth of disk
space. Also, some people cannot easily add another disk - think notebook,
for example.
> Compress a compressed file. Not very productive. It is almost always
> larger the second time (unless a lower level of compression was used
> the first time).
With gzip, no significant effect should be produced. In fact, the only
"real" effect should come from the fact that compressed man pages are
compressed singly instead of in a group, not from compressing twice - the
latter is something gzip can handle.
Ok, pure manpage packages will probably be slightly larger.
Of course, as has been pointed out, this applies equally to every gzipped
piece of documentation.
> >> 4. # find /usr/man -type f -name \*.[0-9]\* -print | xargs gzip -9
>
> > Does that not make upgrades harder? If a man page is deleted from a
> > package, how will dpkg know to delete blah.x.gz? I don't like files
> Not at all. It's not difficult to handle. Compare sizes, use md5sum,
... all of which won't match. If you make gzipped man pages an option (I
still don't see a good reason for not gzipping all in the first place, and
be done with it), then dpkg MUST know about this, or else you might as
well scrap dpkg. Nothing else has a chance to work.
> etc. If anything, starting to gzip manual pages will cause this
> problem if handled by changing the guidelines, not the other way
> around.
Huh?! I don't see how this way of doing it _could_ lead to that problem.
If you do it via the guidelines, all that dpkg sees will be new versions
of a package having a different set of files. That is something dpkg has
handled correctly since longer than I've known it.
> >> 5. makes access of man pages via packages that don't support
> >> compressed man pages impossible
>
> > What packages? We went through all that we know exist on the
> > Debian system at the moment. Also;
> Unhacked versions of some manual page systems.
Again, which ones?
Nobody has yet managed to point out a single one. Looks like a straw man
to me.
> Yes, minor, but this can be done ONCE at the package installer level
... amounting to a lot of work for one person ...
> or several hundred times at the package level.
... each time being rather trivial.
MfG Kai
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