Re: doc-base package: All compression configurable?
On Sun, 13 Jul 1997, Christoph Lameter wrote:
> On Sun, 13 Jul 1997, Christian Schwarz wrote:
>
> >On Sun, 13 Jul 1997, Christoph Lameter wrote:
> >
> >> : Please calm down and read the proposal again. First, nothing in the
> >> : proposal is included "just to stop a discussion". Second, files are
> >> : installed uncompressed only as default. All packages will support the new
> >> : "doc-base" package which will compress all HTML files automatically (even
> >> : without asking the user), if the local sysadmin has decided to do so.
> >>
> >> Can we extend that doc-base package to do the same for manpages and info stuff
> >> etc? I have long thought that all compression should be sysadmin controlled.
> >
> >Why would someone need this? I mean, manpages and info docs can be
> >gzipped without problems (the "viewers" can uncompress the files
> >on-the-fly) and gunzip is quite fast so I don't see why someone would like
> >to install the uncompressed.
>
> 1. There is a unnerving delay when viewing f.e. the bash manpage on some
> of my low end machines.
>
> 2. Uncompressing costs precious CPU resources on busy systems especially
> if to be done again and again. On a high load webserver I do not want
> any spikes in CPU resource use. Uncompressing some of the larger
> manpages can monopolize the CPU for awhile.
>
> 3. A documentation server which does not want to go through the overhead
> of decompressing each file for each request.
>
> 4. The need to repeatedly run indexers and other software across
> manpages gets very slow on some machines. CPU stays busy because all
> manpages have to be uncompressed to be indexed.
Ok.
> >But if there are reasons, this could be implemented easily, I think.
>
> Another result of this would be to simplify packaging. Leave everything
> uncompressed when packaging it up and then the base-doc tool can take
> care of compressing if wanted.
>
> That in turn would get rid of a lot of trouble the maintainers had to go
> through in the past in order to insure for example that symlinks for
> manpages point to the correct files etc. The simpler packaging becomes the
> easier to get rid of problems.
The problem with shipping files uncompressed and compress them later is
that this will take some time on slow machines. What about shipping them
compressed (as we do now) and uncompress them at installation time where
necessary?
Just check the current bug reports. I don't think we get lots of bugs
reported because of uncompressed docs. deb-make (actually debstd) is doing
a great job here!
Thanks,
Chris
-- _,, Christian Schwarz
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