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bug #57558: wishlist: man should be able to decompress more formats

Submitter:  crabbed halo ablution <crabbedhaloablut>
Submitted:  Wed 08 Jan 2020 02:09:50 PM UTC
   
 
Category:  None Severity:  1 - Wish
Item Group:  None Status:  Fixed
Privacy:  Public Assigned to:  None
Open/Closed:  Closed
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Mon 01 Jun 2020 05:17:04 PM UTC, comment #5: 

Ugh, apologies - somebody else reported this independently in https://savannah.nongnu.org/bugs/index.php?58359, and I totally forgot that you'd already suggested a patch for this when dealing with it.

This is fixed in man-db 2.9.2, though I committed a follow-up patch on noting that your description of the compression utility was a bit better:

  https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/man-db.git/commit/?id=54415d39c6920df176def33a87f715b0ddefdfbf

Colin Watson <cjwatson>
Group administrator
Sun 19 Jan 2020 10:09:21 PM UTC, comment #4: 

OK, I'm reasonably persuaded that that's a sufficient reason to add it.

Your patch looks pretty close, thanks!  Just a couple of small things: I'd like the MAN_CHECK_PROGS etc. fragment in configure.ac moved slightly up so that it's above the conditional definition of COMP_CAT; and I think you should probably add a test -n "$zstd" condition to the end of the list of conditions under which COMP_CAT is defined.

Colin Watson <cjwatson>
Group administrator
Wed 08 Jan 2020 04:23:16 PM UTC, comment #3: 

I realised I could probably do this competently and quickly when you said it was just running the programs, not linking against them, so I cooked up a trivial patch against git head.
It runs and views zstd-compressed man pages on my system without any obvious defects.

(file #48183)

crabbed halo ablution <crabbedhaloablut>
Wed 08 Jan 2020 03:39:02 PM UTC, comment #2: 

The linux distro I use (Gentoo) only provides a way to have all documentation (.txt, .man, .anything) compressed with any one chosen compressor.
For my low-powered 10-year old softfloat single-core arm SBCs, the reduction in build time using zstd is nifty while not giving away much compression ratio. I can read the documentation using lesspipe.sh, but the manpages won't cooperate.
The only thing different from xz -> zstd is that you have to pass --rm --quiet to get the same verbosity and file deletion behaviour.

crabbed halo ablution <crabbedhaloablut>
Wed 08 Jan 2020 03:03:23 PM UTC, comment #1: 

man already supports xz (since 2.5.8, released 2010-11-15) and lzma (since 2.5.3, released 2008-11-17).  It detects the decompressor paths at configure time; if it isn't convenient to install them at configure time, you can also explicitly specify the paths by passing the --with-xz and/or --with-lzma options to configure.

It wouldn't be very difficult to add similar support for zstd, though I think I would have to ask why all this proliferation of decompression support is worth it; most man pages are small enough that it doesn't make much difference.  At this point I think I'd want a specific rationale before adding any more.  I certainly don't intend to be completionist about it.

Colin Watson <cjwatson>
Group administrator
Wed 08 Jan 2020 02:09:50 PM UTC, original submission:  

Non-exhaustive list:
 gzip, compress, pack requires gzip
 bzip2 requires bzip2
 zip requires unzip
 rar requires rar or unrar
 7-zip requires 7za
 lzip requires lzip
 lzma requires lzma (limited support only)
 xz requires xz
 zstd requires zstd
 brotli requires bro
 lz4 requires lz4

Personally, I would like to see zstd, xz and lzma supported.

crabbed halo ablution <crabbedhaloablut>

 

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    Follow 4 latest changes.

    Date Changed by Updated Field Previous Value => Replaced by
    2020-06-01 cjwatson StatusNone Fixed
        Open/ClosedOpen Closed
    2020-01-08 crabbedhaloablut Attached File- Added zstd-support.patch, #48183
    2020-01-08 cjwatson Severity3 - Normal 1 - Wish

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