Re: [gentoo-dev] bzipped manpages

[Michael Orlitzky <mjo@gentoo.org>]

On 01/10/2017 06:54 AM, Jan Stary wrote:
> 
> These are workarounds. Let me get back to the original question:
> would you please consider having _uncompressed_ manpages as the default?
> 
> On this particular system, the bzipped /usr/share/man/ is 67M.
> The uncompressed man/ is 108M. That's 40M saved. Seriously?

Since everyone else is giving you a hard time, I think compressing all
of the documentation by default is annoying and over-complicates things.

However, if you asked me what *could* be compressed by default, man
pages with their separate /usr/share/man directory and doman helper
would be at the top of the list. They aren't meant to be read by humans,
the default reader handles them, and they compress well.

And in direct contradiction to my last paragraph, we did invent dohtml
and now have PORTAGE_COMPRESS_EXCLUDE_SUFFIXES set to work around this
exact problem, that web browsers won't call bunzip2 in a pipeline. It
seems a little unfair to let web browsers off the hook but not mdocml.

There are probably fewer people who care about the space than there are
users who have been annoyed that they can't run an example because
ruby/php/python won't run a compressed script. I know that we have
"docompress", but inside the ebuild is the wrong place to battle an
implementation-specific default setting.