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

[Erik Trulsson]

On Wed, May 07, 2003 at 10:49:16PM +0300, Narvi wrote:
> 
> On Wed, 7 May 2003, Matthias Buelow wrote:
> 
> > Narvi writes:
> >
> > >Really - except for a very limited set of streaming applications with hard
> > >latency rules, going away from gzip to a BWT based compressors is a Very
> > >Good Thing (tm).
> >
> > for things like manpages and texinfo-files, even compress(1) would be
> > more than sufficient, if it weren't for license issues (but then again,
> > compress is still included, so what.)  And it surely is a lot faster,
> > especially than bzip2.
> 
> I definately don't agree on texinfo files - these aren't all that small.
> For example, the sizes of gcc.info.gz vs gcc.info.bz2 are:
> 
> 	306122 May  7 22:40 gcc.info.bz2
> 	400320 May  7 22:41 gcc.info.gz
> 
> which is a quite significant difference. I picked the file because of size
> and not change of compression ratio, or check all the files (just in case
> there are any benchmarking paranoids around). On the speed side, the speed
> of bunzip2 only matters if the speed difference between it and gunzip were
> user perceptible on even not really up to date at all hardware, which is
> not the case AFAICT.

Here you are wrong.  On old hardware the difference in speed (and the
difference in memory needed) between bunzip2 and gunzip is quite
noticable.



-- 
<Insert your favourite quote here.>
Erik Trulsson
ertr1013 at student.uu.se