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

From: Matthias Buelow <mkb_at_mukappabeta.de>
Date: Fri, 2 May 2003 19:24:46 +0200
Tim Robbins writes:

>I don't mean to sound rude, but what is the justification for this?

I, of course being just an ignorant user, see no justification for
replacing the default compression method for manpages; a block ordering
compressor like bzip2 is only really useful for large data sets, surely
not for a couple kilobytes of manpages.  One should test whether (on a
slower machine) bzip2 really slows down things much; I would think that
reformatting the pages with nroff far outweighs the cost of
uncompressing in any case, but still.  IMHO using compress or gzip
--fast would be fully sufficient and make decompression faster aswell.
I mean, disks are getting larger every month, and I never had problems
with manpage sizes when I was running on 250MB disks either in the
past.  My worst experience with bzip2 dates back several years, when I
was using it to decompress a multi-megabyte file on an 8 meg
machine...  because of bzip2's much larger working set, the machine was
trashing for hours, with the result of breaking the disk where swap was
located on.  Of course that is unlikely to happen with small manpages.

-- 
Matthias Buelow
home: mkb/at/mukappabeta.de
uni:  mkb/at/informatik.uni-wuerzburg.de
Received on Fri May 02 2003 - 08:24:40 UTC

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