On Sunday, September 19, 2010 19:50:57 Zac Medico wrote: > On 09/19/2010 04:43 PM, Mike Frysinger wrote: > > many man pages exist merely as a redirect to another man page: > > $ xzcat /usr/share/man/man1/zcat.1.xz > > .so man1/gzip.1 > > > > compressing these tiny (always?) results in a larger file. that means we > > arent saving space, and we're adding overhead at runtime. > > > > two options which we can do transparently: > > - rewrite the .so man pages into symlinks > > - omit them from compression > > > > the latter is pretty easy (see below). any preferences on which route to > > take though as the former shouldnt be too hard either ... > > It feels like an insignificant optimization to me, but I don't feel > strongly either way.
~19% of the man pages on my system appear to be forwarding files (glorified symlinks). in my case, that's almost 3000 files. considering things like `makewhatis` need to decompress & read all of these, i think the difference is worth addressing. -mike
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