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

On Fri, May 02, 2003 at 02:33:52PM -0300, Daniel C. Sobral wrote:

> Thomas Seck wrote:
> > * Garrett Wollman (wollman_at_lcs.mit.edu):
> > 
> > 
> >>The correct answer for one of these has no implications on any of
> >>the others.
> > 
> > 
> > I am just a user but I'll second that.
> > 
> > Am I the only one who thinks that some people are on a "kill the GNU,
> > kill it now, no matter the cost" trip again?
> > 
> > I can see no benefit in switching to bzip2 other than eliminating GPL'ed
> > software. No, I do not think disk space is an issue nowadays.
> 
> If two programs do the same thing, but one is GPL and the other is not, 
> the other one is clearly preferable for FreeBSD.
> 
> As far as _ports_ are concerned, it is irrelevant. As far as the _base_ 
> system is concerned, the less we depend on GPL, the better.
> 
> The "sole benefit" you see is clearly enough of a benefit. There _are_ 
> good reasons to reduce dependency on GPL, y'know.

gzip is trivially replaceable by minigzip in this case. It makes little sense
to talk about replacing a GPL'd piece of code with a non-GPL'd piece of code
in this context anyway: we are using a GPL'd man utility by (someone's) choice
when the 4.4BSD implementation is adequate, and we are using GNU groff.
Using bzip2 instead of gzip will not let us format manual pages without GNU
tools.

The real issue here is whether bzip2 compresses manual pages significantly
better than gzip, and whether the speed penalty is worth the space saved.
Let's not get distracted by licenses.


Tim