Bug 556086 – sys-apps/portage does not compress all man pages

• Product: Gentoo Linux
• Status: RESOLVED INVALID

[Description Doug Goldstein (RETIRED) 2015-07-28 01:20:16 UTC]

The files I have installed are:

/usr/share/man
/usr/share/man/man5
/usr/share/man/man5/depmod.d.5.bz2
/usr/share/man/man5/modprobe.d.5.bz2
/usr/share/man/man5/modules.dep.5.bz2
/usr/share/man/man5/modules.dep.bin.5
/usr/share/man/man8
/usr/share/man/man8/depmod.8.bz2
/usr/share/man/man8/insmod.8.bz2
/usr/share/man/man8/kmod.8.bz2
/usr/share/man/man8/lsmod.8.bz2
/usr/share/man/man8/modinfo.8.bz2
/usr/share/man/man8/modprobe.8.bz2
/usr/share/man/man8/rmmod.8.bz2

As you can see "modules.dep.bin.5" did not get compressed.

[Comment 1 Mike Gilbert 2015-07-28 02:21:31 UTC]

Generally, ebuilds are not responsible for compressing man pages. Portage takes care of that.

I believe portage has some logic that intentionally does not compress files under a certain size.

[Comment 2 Mike Gilbert 2015-07-28 02:23:50 UTC]

See line 5 of prepman.

https://gitweb.gentoo.org/proj/portage.git/tree/bin/ebuild-helpers/prepman

[Comment 3 SpanKY 2015-07-28 02:42:14 UTC]

generally speaking, ebuilds are not responsible for compressing their docs.  in this case, certainly kmod is not.

that said, this is WAI and is entirely a feature.  portage stopped auto-compressing small files a while ago because:
(1) the size often goes *up*
(2) it increases runtime overhead to save literally a few bytes

to this specific file:
$ cd /usr/share/man/man5
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 18 Mar  7 14:36 modules.dep.bin.5
$ bzip2 < modules.dep.bin.5 | wc -c
58

so had portage compressed it, you'd be using 40 extra bytes, and it'd be slower