using bzip2 to compress man-pages

[Charles Swiger]

On Sep 22, 2005, at 4:52 PM, Mikhail Teterin wrote:
> Charles Swiger wrote:
>> My guess is that roughly 95% of the manpages aren't going to save a
>> disk sector by switching.
>
> One does not need to save the entire sector-size. Only the (size %
> sector_size), which currently pushes the file into an additional  
> sector.

Agreed, this is exactly right.

> The following command line assumes, the sector size of 512 bytes  
> and the bzip2
> vs. gzip saving of only 10%.

Unfortunately, bzip2 sometimes compresses less well than gzip,  
especially for very small files.  Consider the output from the  
command I posted; the first number is the byte-size using gzip  
followed by the filename, the second line is the byte-size using  
"bzip2 --best":

     1231 /usr/share/man/man1/addftinfo.1.gz
     1272
     1963 /usr/share/man/man1/apply.1.gz
     2010
      667 /usr/share/man/man1/apropos.1.gz
      709
[ ... ]

Notice for files smaller than about 3K, gzip is almost always  
*smaller* than bzip2.

 From about 3K to about 6K, the two seem to be about even, and bzip2  
starts becoming a significant win for files larger than about 10K.

> Notice, it takes care to look once at every
> manual page even if it is has more than one alias (eliminating  
> pages with the
> same inode). Try this on your system:
>
> % find /usr/share/man/ -name \*.gz -ls | sort -k 1 | awk '$1 ==  
> inode { next }
> { inode=$1; total++; if ($7 % 512 < $7*0.10) savings++ } END {print  
> savings "
> out of " total}'
> 1200 out of 2694
>
> 1200 files out 2694... That's a little more than 5%...

Yes, well, you aren't computing a real result.

Assuming that bzip2 always produces smaller files than gzip for the  
average manpage (median size of ~3K compressed) is not valid.  I  
wrote a quick bit of python to compute and tally up the actual block  
sizes, giving the following results:

same # blocks: 2288, gzip > bzip: 217, bzip > gzip 182

http://www.pkix.net/~chuck/manpage_test/

-- 
-Chuck