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Message-ID: <42F357E1.6070300@byu.net>
Date: Fri, 05 Aug 2005 06:13:21 -0600
From: Eric Blake <ebb9 AT byu DOT net>
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To: James McLaughlin <zerotype AT yahoo DOT com>
CC: cygwin AT cygwin DOT com
Subject: Re: gz files in man folders
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According to James McLaughlin on 8/5/2005 5:41 AM:
> While trying to find the file containing the man
> information for g++ (which I succeeded in doing), I
> noticed that in various subfolders of
> c:\cygwin\share\man (in particular man1 and man3) a
> lot of the .1 and .3 (and.something else for the other
> subfolders) files were gzipped. This surprised me as
> they were pretty small files.

For files under 1k, zipping doesn't save any disk space (disk space is
used a block at a time, whether you use the entire block or not), and
wastes CPU cycles as it spawns the extra processes to unzip it.  But for
some man pages, the zipping is an improvement in filesize, so the default
maintainer's script for packaging in cygwin purposefully gzips all man
pages.  Man also purposefully zips (bzip2, not gzip) all cat pages, if you
have /var/cache/man/cat?/ directories.  I do note that in general, bzip2
gets better compression ratios on ASCII text, so maybe we should switch
the cygwin default compression engine for man pages?

> 
> Is there any reason why it wouldn't be a good idea to
> extract some of these (for convenience next time I'm
> looking for things related to man or just "tinkering
> under the bonnet")?

I'm personally happy with either approach, compressed or plain-text,
because I have plenty of hard drive space, and in practice I don't notice
the delay of the extra gunzip process in the loop.

- --
Life is short - so eat dessert first!

Eric Blake             ebb9 AT byu DOT net
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