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

[Ruslan Ermilov]

On Fri, May 02, 2003 at 03:33:34PM +1000, Tim Robbins wrote:
> 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?
> 
Sorry to be sounding obvious, but what other use other than
better compression one should expect from a compression tool?

> 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
> 
If you're bothered with times, I suggest that you put NOMANCOMPRESS,
NODOCCOMPRESS, and NOINFOCOMPRESS into /etc/make.conf.  That will
positively affect the buildworld times too.

FWIW, I'm only going to change the default, the possibility to use
gzip(1) will still be there.


Cheers,
-- 
Ruslan Ermilov		Sysadmin and DBA,
ru at sunbay.com		Sunbay Software AG,
ru at FreeBSD.org		FreeBSD committer,
+380.652.512.251	Simferopol, Ukraine

http://www.FreeBSD.org	The Power To Serve
http://www.oracle.com	Enabling The Information Age
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