Re: gziped man files and other subjects
Hi,
On Fri, 19 Apr 1996 13:42:26 -0500 (CDT), david@elo.ods.com (David
Engel) said:
> 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.
There were at least two implementations available this time last year,
one in Germany and one in France, but I'm not sure of the current
status of either --- they have been very quiet recently.
If you *really* want to do this, I think it might be better to do it
in user mode, compressing unused files in the background and
uncompressing them fully on reference. The reason this method is
better is that it can be done entirely from user space, with no kernel
support. By replacing the compressed files with symlinks, we can trap
references by setting up a daemon sitting at a locally-mounted NFS
mount point, acting as a dummy nfs server. This approach is much more
flexible than a kernel implementation. Anyone interested?
Cheers,
Stephen.
--
Stephen Tweedie <sct@dcs.ed.ac.uk>
Department of Computer Science, Edinburgh University, Scotland.
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