> Fonts for X could be stored as bz2 instead of gz, man-pages could be
> bz2.
No, that's actually not true. Changing how gzip-the-program behaves
would have no effect on X font handling.
Fonts are stored gzipped because there is a fast, free-enough-for-X,
zlib implementation. (The server hasn't forked a decompression
program since X11R2 or so... when the inline zcat code was added.)
Around X11R6 I added zlib font decompression to the upstream sources
(X Consortium and XFree) which is why we have it now. In order to
move to bzip2, you'd have to (1) come up with a library implementation
that was free-enough [GPL isn't, of course; you could probably use the
license already on zlib] (2) wasn't the amazing memory hog that the
current bzip2 programs are (3) didn't annoy people by being slow.
(zlib is actually par with zcat, or maybe a little faster, I forget.
Not a really noticeable hit in any case.)
I'd have to check the code and see if it figures out the compression
by magic number or by file extension. I'm *pretty* sure it does the
latter. If you changed it to handle magic numbers instead, then you
could just have a script that an end user could run that recompresses
the fonts but leaves them in the same file names (after all, if the
machine is fast enough to use bzip2 on the fly, it's fast enough to do
the bulk conversion relatively quickly :-)
_Mark_ <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
The Herd of Kittens
Debian Package Maintainer
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