Re: why aren't man pages compressed?

[Carlos Carvalho <carlos@snfep1.if.usp.br>]

Bruce Perens (Bruce@pixar.com) wrote on 14 November 1995 16:35:

 >I thought about switching on man page compression a while back, and did
 >not because I wanted to allow for other manual pagers than man_db
 >that might not handle it. It is probably worth doing at some point.
 >I think we can compress both the source and the cat files, though

Any decent man program handles compressed pages. If you have one that
doesn't it's a very good reason to ditch it.

 >compressing the cat files is only worthwhile if the uncompressor
 >runs very quickly.

zcat runs fast enough from my experience.

In fact, the only argument I have in favour of uncompressed pages is
that you can run a grep in the entire directory to search for
something. For example, I found the file /etc/gateways and didn't know
what it was about. I did a grep and found it in the routed page.

BTW, why does this file exist in my installation if I haven't
installed the package? Also, I found other files that shouldn't be
there, for example smb.conf (of course I didn't install samba).

Carlos