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

[Emmanuel Thomé]

> man pages aren't formatted by just groff;  packages like zsh are
> installed on Unix systems that have ditroff as standard.  If man decides
> to cope with compressed man pages then it either has to do the job
> right, or man page authors have to know there are limitations in using
> .so.

Ahem. It's not the authors' fault, unfortunately. Using .so is not bad
practice.

> `Fixing' groff in this way won't make the problem man has introduced go
> away.  I shouldn't have to install groff to read a man page.

agreed.

> My out-the-box man handles things other than .gz.

RTFSC ! if your man page exists in .bz2 form or whatever, man will
decompress it using the tool specified in the man.config file. If the
man page consists then of the single line ``.so man1/blah.1'', then man
will try to source blah.1.gz if blah.1 does not exist. That's all. A
symlink does in fact the job much better than this...

> Patching groff is the wrong fix for the problem and would encourage the
> general trend.  Patching gcc so I can bzip2 /usr/include/*.h will be
> next  :-(

For sure. This patch is merely a ``just my $0.02'' addition, and I
wish there were no actual need for it. This being said, I don't think
you can name it bloatware.

E.