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

[Ruslan Ermilov]

On Fri, May 02, 2003 at 05:09:57PM +1000, Tim Robbins wrote:
> On Fri, May 02, 2003 at 09:32:00AM +0300, Ruslan Ermilov wrote:
> > 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?
> 
> Here are the total compressed sizes for all the section 1 manual pages in
> src/usr.bin:
> compress:	670776 bytes, 1.33 * gzip size
> gzip:		504723 bytes, 1.00 * gzip size
> gzip -9:	504441 bytes, 1.00 * gzip size
> bzip2:		494974 bytes, 0.98 * gzip size
> bzip2 -9:	494974 bytes, 0.98 * gzip size
> 
> It does not look like bzip2 compresses the manual pages well enough to bother
> replacing gzip, especially considering the relative speeds of the two and the
> backwards compatibility issues.
> 
Please take into consideration Groff documents under /usr/share/doc
and Texinfo documents under /usr/share/info too.


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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