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

[Alejandro López-Valencia]

On Sunday, August 25, 2002 7:35 AM,
Mark Veltzer <address@hidden> wrote referring to the unbearable subtleness
of being:

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> On Sunday 25 August 2002 15:03, you wrote:
>
> It may sound harsh to you but I really don't care that much for
> commercial UNIX vendors.

Mark,

you are preaching to the choir. Yet, commercial hardware and operating
systems have their time and place. I am trying to be objective here. :)

>
> You are very wrong. RedHat compressed manual pages because it's
> FASTER to show them that way. Because disks are MUCH slower than the
> cpu it turns out that is cheaper (in absolute time) to get a smaller
> file from the disk and do the decompression.

And what about groff's CPU times? troff has always been a hard CPU hitter.

>>
>> In this hysteric times, when hard-drives are one US dollar per
>> gigabyte, 80 GB hard-drives are the norm and CPUs with hardware
>> clocks slower than 1.3 Gigahertz are obsolete, talking about the
>> supposed need to compress man pages seems pointless to me.
>
> Again, this is not about disk size at all... It's about speed (and if
> do get the speed benefit - then why waste the disk space...? You get
> both ends of the stick...).

If you really want speed and have the disk space, short-circuit the
typesetting step storing all manual pages as typeset output.