Hello Werner, Werner LEMBERG <w...@gnu.org> wrote: |Hello Steffen! | |> It effectively adds compression support for (practically) *all* |> files that groff uses during a run. | |Similar to others on the list I'm not really enthused about this |feature. Your idea of wrapping all possible file access methods into |a single class (`file_case') seems like a good idea, but compression |per se is a minor issue IMHO and not really important, given that |groff input files are small normally, and man pages and the like can |be handled the Unix way, this is, by external compression and |decompression programs. | |*However*, if you really like to play around file issues: A sorely |needed feature is integration of the kpathsea library into groff! |Regarding file access and directory structure, TeX and groff are |almost the same, so it would be a *great* idea to use what already |exists. IMHO, it would be silly to reinvent the wheel, given that |kpathsea is very mature and should already cover all aspects of |groff's file and directory access out of the box. In particular, it |would allow to have not a single `download' file for grops but a |series of such files, and it shouldn't be too hard to implement |cumulative reading. | |Given that groff has such a small footprint, I could even imagine that |groff gets distributed within TeXLive, greatly increasing its |availability on non-Unix systems... | | Werner | |PS: Please use tabs in C++ or C source code files! You have changed | that to spaces, unnecessarily increasing the diff file size. And | stay within 80 characters per line if possible.
ok i'm thinking about this some more, like looking a bit more onto RESOURCE_FONT related code and dealing with the fseek(3)s on PS files in troff/input.cpp, followed by a public domain commit. I wonder how much work it would be to completely turn over the searchpath related standard I/O to a class method based one -- then it would be easily possible to link against compression libraries via pretty simple searchpath.cc private classes. I think adding some flags to the searchpath functions would also make sense, in order to selectively enable this extension and make it available for only troff/input.cpp:source() as a starter. (P.S.: i have a kerTeX package laying around, shall i ever have the time to fix our cut-in-half old TeX thing.) --steffen
