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

[Emmanuel Thomé]

It is.

If you look at the source code of ``man'' itself, you will find that
there is extra provision for file with a single .so in the first line.
Just grp for .so anywhere else, you'll encounter problems. Examples are
zshall, as well as all the pvm man pages, and a dozen of sporadic ones.

Agreed, the unix way is not to compress man pages, and would rather be
to put the manpages on a separate, compressed filesystem if really
needed. However, if just want things to work at a low cost, I claim that
groff is the place where to put this functionality.

The code in itself does not handle anything else than .gz (just like the
similar functionality of man, by the way). This being say, it's pretty
trivial to add on top of the class opaque_fp that's in there.

E.

On Sat, Aug 24, 2002 at 08:31:40PM +0100, Ralph Corderoy wrote:
> 
> Hi Werner,
> 
> > I received the following from Emmanuel:
> > 
> > > You will find enclosed a patch to groff-1.18 providing support for
> > > transparent sourcing of gzipped files -- This comes in handy on RH
> > > linux where all manpages are gzipped by default, and sometimes
> > > source eachother. Patch is 340 lines, and requires zlib
> > > (configure.ac untouched though)
> > 
> > The patch looks fine, thanks, and I think it would be a very valuable
> > addition
> 
> I use Red Hat 7.2 and find `man fgrep' works just fine despite
> 
>     $ zc /usr/share/man/man1/fgrep.1.gz 
>     .so man1/grep.1
>     $ ls /usr/share/man/man1/grep.*
>     /usr/share/man/man1/grep.1.gz
> 
> because the man command sorts it out and feeds uncompressed data to
> groff.
> 
> So is it worth the extra code which the reader has to parse?  (I know
> what stdlib routines do without having to look up their definitions.)
> And how about .bz2, .lzo, etc.  Isn't it the Unix way to keep this kind
> of thing separate?
> 
> Just my 2c.
> 
> 
> Ralph.