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

[Colin Watson]

On Sun, Aug 25, 2002 at 09:09:50AM +0200, Emmanuel Thom? wrote:
> 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.

That probably depends on which version of man you're looking at. The one
I maintain basically only uses that check for bookkeeping purposes, and
unconditionally runs its version of soelim over the page anyway.

> 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.

Have you reported this to Red Hat or Andries Brouwer?

> 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).

Again, your parenthesis depends on which version of man you're looking
at. For example, HP-UX man pages are (or used to, at least? I haven't
checked recently) stored compressed with compress(1), and man-db
supports this.

Also, the gunzip code will not be removed from man, since there will
always be older systems which require it. So adding transparent
decompression feels to me like feature creep.

Cheers,

-- 
Colin Watson                                  address@hidden