Fw: [Groff] [groff/patch] transparent gzip

[Alejandro López-Valencia]

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On Sunday, August 25, 2002 6:06 AM, Mark Veltzer <address@hidden> wrote:

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> Ralph !
>
> I understand all of your objections. How about this idea:
>
> Find a generic C library (free source, maintained by a third party)

Hmmm... Why do you want to start an endless cycle of featurism? It is bad
enough already that you need libtiff, libjpg, libpng, libz, ghostscript and
netpbm installed to be able to process anything into HTML. These packages
are usually installed in a Linux or a free BSD distro, but not in commercial
unices (which include MacOSX, btw).

Having compressed man pages is a convenience that can be justified only if
you had very limited disk space, where you can consider justifiable that the
extra CPU time wasted decompressing the files before feeding them to nroff
is worth the space saved. If you examine the sources of the man application
used in Linux, you'll discover it was written in those times where a
DECstation 5000, with 78Mb RAM and a 500 Mb hard drive was US$23000 (yes,
three zeroes) a pop; that wasn't that long ago (11 years to be exact, free
man is a lot older, 1885 I think).

In this hysteric times, when hard-drives are one US dollar per gigabyte, 80
GB hard-drives are the norm and CPUs with hardware clocks slower than 1.3
Gigahertz are obsolete, talking about the supposed need to compress man
pages seems pointless to me.