Re: [Groff] Compression support for files?

[Steffen Nurpmeso]

Good morning,

Clarke Echols <address@hidden> wrote:
 |In 1985, disk space was very expensive.  HP sold a 400 Mbyte hard
 |drive that consumed 600 watts of power to operate for US$ 38,000
 |each.
 [.]
 |Today, you can buy a 1000 Gbyte hard drive in a local retail store
 |for under $100.  That is 10 cents per gigabyte, and it runs on less
 |that 20 watts of power.

There would surely be more hope if sapiens sapiens would first
understand things before going to hype it.

 |Groff is fast, efficient, and reliable.  It also behaves the way
 |experienced users expect it to behave.  Any "savings" from compression
 |are not worth the time or effort, and certainly not worth the risk of
 |breaking the groff package by someone inadvertently breaking an
 |important legacy behavior while attempting to create an unneeded,
 |unwanted, probably not even useful new feature few others, if any,
 |would be interested in having.

I find myself being completely incapable to understand what you
mean.  I never had any intention to inadvertently break any
behaviour at all, nor does the (draft) patch do so.  No, the
original intention was to extend the `.so' request in a way that
makes it possible to use it like in this example i've used for
testing:

what.1:

  .Dd June 6, 1993
  .Dt WHAT 1
  .Sh NAME
  .Nm what
  .Nd "show what versions of object modules were used"
  .Sh SYNOPSIS
  .Nm
  .Ar name Ar ...
  .Sh DESCRIPTION
  .Nm
  reads each file
  .Ar name
  and searches for sequences of the form
  .Dq \&@(#) ,
  as inserted by the source code control system.
  .so what-hist.1

what-hist.1:

  .Sh HISTORY
  The
  .Nm
  command appeared in
  .Bx 4.0 .

Now if the manuals get compressed as they usually are then with
the proposed patch `what-hist.1' will still be found and included,
i.e., `.so' can actually be used, transparently.  This is new.

Actually it turned out that GNU troff(1) is at least in parts
nicely designed object-oriented C++ code, so that the
modifications necessary for `.so' transparently propagate the
functionality all over the codebase, therefore allowing
practically all files to be compressed.  This is fantastic, and
it's such a shame that the languages exploded the way they did,
making using C++ a bloated disaster.  And now i even turn to
disagree with all of you given how wedged and even castrated
several modern environments ship their troff(1).  Keeping the full
power of a typesetting system with the installed size of an eunuch
will make the willy turn blue.

--steffen