Re: Fwd: Re: Fw: [Groff] [groff/patch] transparent gzip

[Colin Watson]

On Sun, Aug 25, 2002 at 07:46:26PM +0300, Mark Veltzer wrote:
> 4. Regarding the term "bloatware". As I explain in earlier post such a
> system will actually REDUCE groffs current size (either in the case
> you are using the current DLL or in the case you don't have it and
> groff works with it's built in "open(2)" "read(2)" "close(2)" calls).
> Which bloatware are you refering to ? Groff today can be said to be
> bloated since it already has gzip code.

Where? I don't see it.

> 6. "undesirable dependencies". Repeat after me : dependencies are
> desirable. No one seems to understand this. RPM is good. DEB is good.
> They are the reason modern Linux systems are breathing. They keep the
> whole mess together.

In the case of groff, an application installed on even many minimal
systems, it is still desirable to keep it small and resist pulling in
more than you need, especially when the functionality you think you need
it for is already implemented elsewhere. This was one of the reasons I
dropped the transparent decompression support that used to be in the
Debian groff package.

-- 
Colin Watson                                  address@hidden