Re: gziped man files and other subjects

[david@elo.ods.com (David Engel)]

> In my opinion, the problem here is not with dpkg, but with gzip and
> man.
> 
> man should *always* use /bin/zcat on the front of its pipe to display
> manual pages.  The same should apply to man clones.
> 
> gzip ought to be able to manage compressing a file then renaming it
> back to the original name (and the reverse procedure for
> uncompressing).  It also ought to have an option to support this.
> [However, we don't *have* to have this -- a shell script can do the
> same thing.]

Stephen Tweedle was working on automatic, invisible compression for
the ext2fs a long time ago.  Does anyone know whatever happened to
that effort?  If that feature were available, it would make this whole
issue moot.  Users who wanted compressed manpages could simply mark
/usr/man as compressed and forget about it.

David
-- 
David Engel                        Optical Data Systems, Inc.
david@ods.com                      1101 E. Arapaho Road
(214) 234-6400                     Richardson, TX  75081