man/cat pages, compressed/or not

[Barry Bouwsma]

Salutations, dudes.

I've added an unsightly hack to `man' so that when it creates
catpages from the compressed manpages, it's possible that they
can be created uncompressed (for the benefit of older slower
machines with newer big disks).

But I'm wondering what's the best way to do this, if this is
something that might be of general interest...

(I think I also took a meatgrinder to `catman' some time back
to get it to spit out uncompressed pages.  I can't remember
what problems I may have had, in that `man' didn't seem to
want to use these pages, but that may be solved by my latest
hacks.)

There's a make.conf variable one can set to create uncompressed
man pages; should there be something similar to decide whether
man should create compressed or uncompressed catpages?

Right now, I just let one define another option, which makes
man put out uncompressed pages, in the Makefile (where the
DO_COMPRESS is defined).  Purely as a proof of concept.

Is such an option desirable for anyone else as well?

With this, one can have compressed manpages (to save space on
seldom-accessed files), and uncompressed corresponding catpages
for fast access...

(I know, you'll tell me that if I have a big disk and a slow
machine, there's no reason to want compressed manpages to go
with the uncompressed catpages, so set NOMANCOMPRESS=true.)


thanks
barry bouwsma