Re: HEADS UP: bzip2(1) compression for manpages, Groff and Texinfo docs

On Fri, May 02, 2003 at 09:32:00AM +0300, Ruslan Ermilov wrote:
> On Fri, May 02, 2003 at 03:33:34PM +1000, Tim Robbins wrote:
> > On Fri, May 02, 2003 at 04:13:07AM +0300, Ruslan Ermilov wrote:
> > 
> > > This is just an announcement that I'm going to add bzip2(1)
> > > support to man(1) and makewhatis(1) (catman(1) already has
> > > it), and then switch the default compression method from
> > > gzip(1) to bzip2(1), for manpages, Groff and Texinfo docs.
> > > (The latest 4.5 texinfo supports bzip2.)
> > 
> > I don't mean to sound rude, but what is the justification for this?
> > 
> Sorry to be sounding obvious, but what other use other than
> better compression one should expect from a compression tool?

Here are the total compressed sizes for all the section 1 manual pages in
src/usr.bin:
compress:	670776 bytes, 1.33 * gzip size
gzip:		504723 bytes, 1.00 * gzip size
gzip -9:	504441 bytes, 1.00 * gzip size
bzip2:		494974 bytes, 0.98 * gzip size
bzip2 -9:	494974 bytes, 0.98 * gzip size

It does not look like bzip2 compresses the manual pages well enough to bother
replacing gzip, especially considering the relative speeds of the two and the
backwards compatibility issues.


Tim