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

[Garance A Drosihn]

At 9:32 AM +0300 5/2/03, Ruslan Ermilov wrote:
>On Fri, May 02, 2003 at 03:33:34PM +1000, Tim Robbins wrote:
>  >
>  > 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?

It seems reasonable to make it so bzip'ed man pages can be
used, but I see no burningly-urgent reason that the default
compression must be changed before 5.1-release.  Why should
other developers have to stop what they're doing just to make
sure this significant change is not going to be disruptive?

Reducing the need on GPL'ed programs is definitely a good
goal (IMO), but I think this is a little too disruptive a
change to be making so close to a release date.  There isn't
any critical benefit to 5.1 per se, and the time that other
developers spend on the fallout from this change is probably
going to take away from issues which are much more important
to the 5.1 release.

If we were to vote on this, I'd say "do it right after 5.1
release, but not now".

-- 
Garance Alistair Drosehn            =   gad at gilead.netel.rpi.edu
Senior Systems Programmer           or  gad at freebsd.org
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute    or  drosih at rpi.edu