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From: csgr@cs.ru.ac.za (Geoff Rehmet)
Subject: Re: man works sssslow
Message-ID: <Cr8xI0.C2H@hippo.ru.ac.za>
Sender: news@hippo.ru.ac.za (Usenet News Admin)
Reply-To: csgr@cs.ru.ac.za
Organization: Rhodes University, Grahamstown, South Africa
References: <2sjka9$qmd@panix2.panix.com> <CqsD1r.243M@ns1.nodak.edu> <771348136snz@helen.demon.co.uk>
Date: Sat, 11 Jun 1994 18:46:46 GMT
Lines: 38
In <771348136snz@helen.demon.co.uk> ian@helen.demon.co.uk (Ian Newham) writes:
>In article <CqsD1r.243M@ns1.nodak.edu> tinguely@plains.NoDak.edu writes:
>Sometime ago I remember someone talking about having man pages compressed
>on disk (gz?) and uncompressing them on the fly when you read that page.
>sounds like a good compromise between space/access time. anyone know
>if/how it's done? I think I saw it in the NetBSD-current mailing list.
FreeBSD now supports compressed formatted and unformatted manual pages.
(The manual system does also handle uncompressed pages.) Basically,
unformatted pages are uncompressed before being piped through nroff to
format them. The formatted versions are then also saved on disk
(compressed) so that subsequent accesses go to the formatted page. (As
part of my daily runs I delete any formatted pages which have not been
accessed for 3 days.)
Full support for compressed manual pages will only be available in
FreeBSD 1.1.5, which will have manual pages installed compressed by
default (which gives a disk saving of about 2.8M, which is significant
for users which small disks.) There will also be a script provided with
1.1.5 which allows uncompressed manual pages (such as those from
XFree86) to be compressed. (Compressing the XFree manual pages gives
another nice disk saving.)
There are one or two tricky things which have to be taken into account
when using compressed unformatted pages. First, a lot of pages are hard
links to the same file, and second some manual pages (mainly those
belonging to X) have .so entries, which have to be eliminated before
being compressed. (A trick in the script that compresses existing
installed manual pages is to find that some pages with .so entries
contain only one line, which is a link to another page - so a page with
a .so csn be replaced with a hard link.)
Geoff.
--
Geoff Rehmet, Computer Science Department, | ____ _ o /\
Rhodes University, South Africa |___ _-\_<, / /\/\
FreeBSD core team | (*)/'(*) /\/ / \ \
csgr@cs.ru.ac.za, csgr@freefall.cdrom.com, geoff@neptune.ru.ac.za