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

From: Narvi <narvi_at_haldjas.folklore.ee>
Date: Thu, 8 May 2003 00:25:32 +0300 (EEST)
On Wed, 7 May 2003, Matthias Buelow wrote:

> Narvi writes:
>
> >I definately don't agree on texinfo files - these aren't all that small.
> >For example, the sizes of gcc.info.gz vs gcc.info.bz2 are:
> >
> >	306122 May  7 22:40 gcc.info.bz2
> >	400320 May  7 22:41 gcc.info.gz
>
> Hmm, one might consider 100K insignificant on today's disk sizes :)
>

The summary savings for /usr/share/info is about 500KB. It would not be
insignificant for a live installations on USB or mini-CD media and might
let you squeeze in another useful program.

> >there are any benchmarking paranoids around). On the speed side, the speed
> >of bunzip2 only matters if the speed difference between it and gunzip were
> >user perceptible on even not really up to date at all hardware, which is
> >not the case AFAICT.
>
> I would disagree if this were a NetBSD list ;)  But since it isn't,
> you basically might be right.  A bigger matter is the working set
> of the bunzip2 process, I think it's always at least 3-4 megs while
> uncompressing.  But then again, this isn't NetBSD, which you would
> want to run on "obsolete" hardware (like an old, slow VAX with 8 megs
> RAM, for example). ;)

IMHO various sm,all media live systems are more valuable than speed on
systems weaker than P5-100 & 64MB/RAM. Almost anything running on top of
freebsd will want beefier hardware aswell, and speed of man would not be
critical on such systems.

If we were discussing eliminating support for gzip I would disagree - old
machines should still stay reasonable - but the primary focus should not
be distracted by machines older than 4 years.

>
> --
> Matthias Buelow
> home: mkb/at/mukappabeta.de
> uni:  mkb/at/informatik.uni-wuerzburg.de
>
Received on Wed May 07 2003 - 12:25:41 UTC

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