On 09/05/2015 03:56 PM, Gary Johnson wrote: > Here are the results of comparing the sizes of the Vim directories > installed as a package on my Fedora 14 system (Vim 7.3.315) with > those of my local build of Vim 7.4.838. Directory sizes were found > using 'du -hs'. The Fedora package doc files are gzipped; my doc > file are not compressed. > > /usr/share/vim/vim73 22M > /usr/share/vim/vim73/doc 2.5M > > /usr/local/share/vim/vim74 29M > /usr/local/share/vim/vim74/doc 6.0M > > What this shows is that the Fedora packagers are saving no more that > 3.5 MB of disc space by compressing the doc files. Given the size > of today's discs, it's ridiculous to spend any effort on compressing > these files or on working around problems from them being compressed. > > Fedora should stop compressing these files. > > Regards, > Gary
Gary what your statistics show is that the total size of the documentation files for Vim 7.4 exceeds that of Vim 7.3 by 3.5 megabytes. It does not show how much can be gained from the use of compression. Now while whatever gains can be made won't be astronomically huge they will still be worth it. Now you and Christian do have a valid point about the fact that today's disk sizes are quite large and the savings aren't all that significant. In fact this is so much so that had we been having this conversation just a few months ago I would have agreed a lot more. However currently my disk is full almost to capacity in spite of my best efforts to remove extra cruft and frankly any space savings I could get right now would actually be quite appreciated. Anyway a snippet of terminal output is worth a thousand words: [georgiy@PANTHER ~]$ df -h Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on devtmpfs 1.5G 0 1.5G 0% /dev tmpfs 1.5G 84K 1.5G 1% /dev/shm tmpfs 1.5G 1.1M 1.5G 1% /run tmpfs 1.5G 0 1.5G 0% /sys/fs/cgroup /dev/mapper/logical_volumes-root_volume 20G 18G 738M 97% / tmpfs 1.5G 44K 1.5G 1% /tmp /dev/sda1 319M 163M 136M 55% /boot /dev/mapper/logical_volumes-data_volume 207G 194G 2.2G 99% /home/georgiy/Data tmpfs 298M 4.0K 298M 1% /run/user/991 tmpfs 298M 24K 297M 1% /run/user/1000 [georgiy@PANTHER ~]$ Having seen with your own eyes the stats for both my root and data volumes need I say more? Though I'm not exactly rich at the moment perhaps I may be able to afford to upgrade to a bigger hard drive when I have no other choice. However many others especially those users in poor/developing countries wouldn't be able to afford this and that's even if they have access to some old resource constrained computer at all. One of the key advantages that make Linux and Vim are that they are much less bloated and much more accessible to those without much in the way of resources. As a side note in many ways I like Emacs a lot better than Vim. Though this bit is purely subjective I find the keyboard shortcuts a lot more comfortable. I also like the fact that I don't have to switch modes every time I want to say delete a bunch of words and don't have to be anywhere near as conscious of the editor mode I'm in. Emacs also gives me less headaches when copying and pasting snippets of code. Why have I been using Vim in spite of all that for all these years? Because the rest of Emacs is so bloated and clunky. You don't want to become Emacs. You don't want to wake up one day and realize that Vim has gone (Windows) Vista. Now I will be taking this up with the folks at Fedora. Ultimately though the more I think about it the more I think this is best solved in Vim by having vimtutor load the gzip plugin if necessary and encourage compressing the help pages by default. Just about every distribution compresses man pages and many other kinds of documentation (which across thousands of packages saves quite some space) and hence packagers wanting to compress Vim's help pages isn't all that outlandish and unreasonable. At the very least this issue should be documented in maybe the INSTALL or README file or something of the source distribution. Fedora packagers aren't the dumbest guys by any stretch of the imagination and that if they made this mistake during packaging then odds are very good that packagers from many other distros will as well resulting in more bug reports like this from other people. Fixing this in Vim would kill many birds with one stone. Perhaps I can even be of help implementing the fix. Let me know how I can be of use. Regards, Georgiy -- -- You received this message from the "vim_dev" maillist. Do not top-post! Type your reply below the text you are replying to. For more information, visit http://www.vim.org/maillist.php --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "vim_dev" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
