Re: don't gzip man files
On Thu, 18 Apr 1996, Michael Shields wrote:
> 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.
To me, that seems like an awfully complicated solution for the size of the
problem. Seems like that kind of solution could create bigger problems
than the one it's trying to solve.
Why don't we simply go with gzipped manpages from now on? It wouldn't add
more than than a fraction of a second to the operation of looking up a
manpage... an operation that is already not too frequent, and anyways the
manpages you look up most frequently are already cached in /var/catman.
On the other hand, it gives back 6 Megs of disk space (was that the figure
quoted?). And... one thing that hasn't been pointed out: the number of HDs
you can plug in a system is also finite. For the IDE crowd, that number is
'4'. And then 'adding a new HD' stop being a (relatively) cheap
option. It's either "replace a HD" or "buy a SCSCI card and a HD".
And also... the average person on debian-devel probably has a better
machine than the average PC person (or Linux person). When you've got Linux
installed on a spare 250 Meg HD (which was my case only a few monts ago),
every megabyte counts.
So, unless many people on debian-devel still object, how about simply going
with gzipped manpages from now on? No solution is ever going to make
everyone happy... This one just seems the lesser evil.
<clambering off soapbox>
Christian
Reply to: