Date: Mon, 11 Aug 1997 13:17:04 +0300 (IDT)
From: Eli Zaretskii <eliz AT is DOT elta DOT co DOT il>
To: Michael Bukin <bukinm AT inp DOT nsk DOT su>
cc: djgpp AT delorie DOT com
Subject: Re: Plans for Emacs reading gzipped info files?
In-Reply-To: <m3pvrq3gou.fsf@H-Bukin.inp.nsk.su>
Message-ID: <Pine.SUN.3.91.970811131641.7085B-100000@is>
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On 7 Aug 1997, Michael Bukin wrote:

> Nate Eldredge <eldredge AT ap DOT net> writes:
> > 
> > Are there any plans to have Emacs be able to read gzipped info files, like
> > info can? The Unix version of Emacs does this.
> > 
> 
>   Try using jka-compr package, it works for me.
> 
> The following may be complicated a little, because I have DJGPP emacs
> and NT emacs share lisp and info files.

Last time I tried, `jka-compr' doesn't work on MS-DOS due to file name
conflicts and other problems.  At one point, I made it work on DOS,
but Richard Stallman wasn't interested to install the necessary
changes (or maybe I wasn't persistent enough to talk him into that),
so they are lost in my archives somewhere.

On the other hand, the Emacs Info reader should already support
automatic uncompression of Info files, even without `jka-compr'.  If
that support doesn't work for you, please tell me how does it fail.
To test it, compress one of the subfiles of the Emacs manual and
invoke Info.  For example:

	      gzip -9 info/emacs-1      (creates emacs-1.gz)
	      emacs -q
	      C-h i

Now step through the first chapters and see if it works.

> info files are not split (makeinfo --no-split)

This would mean that the Info file for Emacs is about 1.5MB, and is
read into Emacs every time you need to consult the on-line manual.
Many people don't have a 64MB machine to afford such large files.

Doesn't emacs-1.gz, emacs-2.gz etc. work for you?