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

[Tim Robbins]

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?

An extremely rough test:

$ time bzip2 -c sh.1 | wc -c 
   16099
    0.24s real     0.21s user     0.03s system
$ time gzip -c sh.1 | wc -c 
   18036
    0.12s real     0.10s user     0.01s system

bzip2 takes ~2 times as long as gzip and the resulting file with bzip2 is ~0.9
times the size of the gzip file.

bzip2 does not seem to perform significantly better on small files:

$ time gzip -c who.1 | wc -c
    2168
    0.03s real     0.00s user     0.00s system
$ time bzip2 -c who.1 | wc -c
    2208
    0.04s real     0.03s user     0.00s system

(These tests weren't conducted on a particularly fast machine by today's
standards:
CPU: Pentium/P55C (199.43-MHz 586-class CPU)
  Origin = "GenuineIntel"  Id = 0x544  Stepping = 4
  Features=0x8001bf<FPU,VME,DE,PSE,TSC,MSR,MCE,CX8,MMX> )


Tim