On Wed, Apr 12, 2023 at 10:24 PM Alejandro Colomar <alx.manpages@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > $ sudo make install-man prefix=/opt/local/man/xz___ -j LINK_PAGES=symlink Z=.xz XZFLAGS= | wc -l Small nitpick here as Kerin's recommended pb=0 isn't actually used. https://bugs.gentoo.org/169260#c19 (from Kerin) suggests that we might get one-third more. I'm having trouble getting the Makefile to behave on MSYS2, but it does shrink a manual copy of man*/ totalling 7.2 M (probably because `exit` and `nan` didn't get checked out by git -- case-insensitivity issues) down to 2.8 M (both `du --apparent-size -sh`). > .bz2, .lz, and .xz have similar times, and tuning the compression > doesn't produce important changes in speed Or size. This is to be expected, since man pages are really tiny files, to the point that compressors can't see much context. [Zstd and brotli each have a "dictionary mode" to deal with this, but (a) Zstd dict-file requires an extra flag on decompress (b) nobody has brotli, which has a default dictionary, installed.] > .xz, but I don't see any advantage of using .xz). Going for `xz -9` only unnecessarily inflates the dictionary size beyond the file size and therefore the mem requirement. The dictionary size at -0 is 256 KiB, already enough for almost every man page in existence. (gz -9 is 32 KiB, if I recall correctly.) > Conclussions: > > Any compression formats other than .gz are unreasonably slow. > I'd say either use .gz, or plain text, or prepare to > contribute code yourself to man-db to optimize for your favourite > compression format. For every compression format someone adds, there's going to be one more optional dependency... Cheers, Mingye
