On 2011-08-15 23:29:17 -0400, James Vega wrote:
> You mean like lesspipe(1)? Seems like it might need to be updated to
> handle *.xz, but other than that looks like it fits the bill.

lesspipe(1) from the less package is a bit primitive. How about using
Wolfgang Friebel's version, which already supports xz?

http://www-zeuthen.desy.de/~friebel/unix/lesspipe.html

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Hi there!

On Tue, 16 Aug 2011 12:43:39 +0200, Vincent Lefevre wrote:
> On 2011-08-15 23:29:17 -0400, James Vega wrote:
>> You mean like lesspipe(1)? Seems like it might need to be updated to
>> handle *.xz, but other than that looks like it fits the bill.
>
> lesspipe(1) from the less package is a bit primitive. How about using
> Wolfgang Friebel's version, which already supports xz?
>
> http://www-zeuthen.desy.de/~friebel/unix/lesspipe.html

Some reasons from the old maintainer:

<http://bugs.debian.org/205702>

It happened I saw that it contains code from you, Vincent:

<http://lesspipe.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/lesspipe/trunk/sxw2txt?view=markup>

Thx, bye,
Gismo / Luca

Adam Borowski <kilobyte@angband.pl> writes:

> On the other hand, zcat and zless are nothing but thin shell wrappers
> over "gzip -cd", without loads of extra functionality lesspipe has. I'd
> turn them into a C program linked against zlib (priority: required),
> liblzma2 (priority: required) and libbz2 (priority: important, might be
> dlopened instead).

One angle of this discussion is confusing me: zcat and zless are upstream
binaries that are part of a package that we build from upstream source.
That upstream is gzip; presumably the gzip maintainers aren't particularly
interested in adding build dependencies on other compression formats. (I
wouldn't be if I were them; it seems a bit outside their bailiwick.)

Are people who are proposing that we change these programs proposing we
build a new package with binaries of those same names and use
alternatives? That Debian fork gzip? Something else?

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On Tue, Aug 16, 2011 at 10:51:30AM -0700, Russ Allbery wrote:
> Adam Borowski <kilobyte@angband.pl> writes:
>
> > On the other hand, zcat and zless are nothing but thin shell wrappers
> > over "gzip -cd", without loads of extra functionality lesspipe has. I'd
> > turn them into a C program linked against zlib (priority: required),
> > liblzma2 (priority: required) and libbz2 (priority: important, might be
> > dlopened instead).
>
> One angle of this discussion is confusing me: zcat and zless are upstream
> binaries that are part of a package that we build from upstream source.
> That upstream is gzip; presumably the gzip maintainers aren't particularly
> interested in adding build dependencies on other compression formats. (I
> wouldn't be if I were them; it seems a bit outside their bailiwick.)
>
> Are people who are proposing that we change these programs proposing we
> build a new package with binaries of those same names and use
> alternatives? That Debian fork gzip? Something else?

I propose that we provide a separate package containing zcat, zless,
etc., remove them from gzip and make gzip depend on the new package.
As for who maintains the new package, no I am not volunteering.

Ben.

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* Adam Borowski <kilobyte@angband.pl>, 2011-08-16, 12:18:
zcat and zless are nothing but thin shell wrappers over "gzip -cd",
without loads of extra functionality lesspipe has. I'd turn them into a
C program linked against zlib (priority: required), liblzma2 (priority:
required) and libbz2 (priority: important, might be dlopened instead).


See http://packages.debian.org/sid/zutils - though the way it's
currently packaged is not particularly impressive.


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#include <hallo.h>
* Adam Borowski [Tue, Aug 16 2011, 12:18:40PM]:

> "zcat" already supports multiple formats: gzip and compress, it's just that
> support for uncompressing the latter is included in gzip's binary. Since
> it's not called "gzcat" but generic "zcat", I think that's a better idea
> than proliferation of bzcat, xzcat, my-newest-formatcat.

ucat from the unp package does just that - print with any streamable
format unp knows about.

Regards,
Eduard.

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On 16/08/11 00:10, Carsten Hey wrote:
> bzip2 has a better compression on average for some filetypes, xz[1] has
> a better compression on average for others:
>
> gzip bzip2 xz bzip2+xz[3]
> text files[2] 94312922 73496587 77783076 73496587
> other files 16577181 14609893 14275484 14275484
> sum 110890103 88106480 92058560 87772071
>
> Among the "other files" are also a lot of text files, if we would
> compress Debian packages instead, xz would win presumably.
>
> Anyway, I don't think this difference of 4 MiB on a desktop system is
> significant.
>
>
> I would prefer to avoid bloating the set of pseudo essential packages
> without a good reason and I think users should be able to decompress all
> files in /u/s/d. There are plans to let dpkg depend on liblzma2 instead
> of xz and it already depends on libbz2-1.0. If dpkg's dependency on
> libbz2 is planned to be removed in future, I would prefer to let libbz2
> vanish from the pseudo essential set and use xz also for /u/s/d,
> otherwise I would prefer using bzip2 over xz for /u/s/d.

One advantage of gzip /usr/share/doc is that when served by an
appropriately configured web server .gz files will be transparently
decompressed and displayed by most web browsers. I believe Policy
requires Debian web servers to make /u/s/d available at
http://localhost/doc/. While this obviously isn't an overriding
consideration it is a nice easy way to browse the documentation. Can
same be done for any other compression formats?

Roger


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Ben Hutchings wrote:
> Russ Allbery wrote:
> > Are people who are proposing that we change these programs proposing we
> > build a new package with binaries of those same names and use
> > alternatives? That Debian fork gzip? Something else?
>
> I propose that we provide a separate package containing zcat, zless,
> etc., remove them from gzip and make gzip depend on the new package.
> As for who maintains the new package, no I am not volunteering.

This has been proposed and discussed upstream:

https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-gzip/2009-11/threads.html

The web mail archive doesn't thread across months. Here are
continuing months of discussion:

https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-gzip/2010-12/threads.html

https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-gzip/2011-01/threads.html

Bob

On Tue, Aug 16, 2011 at 10:43:04AM +1000, Russell Coker wrote:
> On Tue, 16 Aug 2011, Iustin Pop <iustin@debian.org> wrote:
> > There is also information on Wikipedia about various compression
> > benchmarks, but IMHO if we want to switch from gzip then bzip2
> > doesn't make sense for /usr/share/doc.
>
> I'd like to see zless work transparently with bzip and xz compressed files.
> There's really no need for three different wrapper programs when the zless
> program can just consult the magic db to determine which decompression
> program to use.

I'd like to see _less_ work transparently with bzip and xz compressed
files, too. It's not impossible, I've seen it done on default RedHat
installations.

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On Mon, 15 Aug 2011 18:33:48 +0100, Lars Wirzenius <liw@liw.fi> wrote:
>On the other hand, many computers now have an SSD drive, for speed,
>which is relatively small. Further, most users will likely need files in
>/usr/share/doc rarely, if ever, so not compressing things risks wasting
>a bunch of disk space for no particular benefit.

How about making this configurable within dpkg, so that the people who
want their /usr/share/doc to be uncompressed can tell dpkg to do it
for them without breaking dpkg's databases?

Greetings
Marc
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