Subject: font stuff and man pages in distributions
To: None <tech-install@netbsd.org>
From: Simon Burge <simonb@netbsd.org>
List: tech-install
Date: 05/01/1999 22:26:43
[[ Bcc'd to hopefully catch everyone affected by this - replies to
   tech-install please.  Also cc'd to tech-x11 if it existed :-) ]].

Folks,

I've going through the distribution notes, and I've noticed a
discrepancy or two or three in the font sets:

 + All ports have the same font list except for the i386 which has
   cyrillic fonts - why is this an exception?

 + Can little-endian PCF font files be used on big-endian machine as
   vice-versa?  The uncompressed hanglm24.pcf is the same size on the
   pmax and arm32 is the same, but the LSB version (pmax) compresses
   better:

     pmax:
	nbftp:X11/fonts/misc 231> gzip -9v < hanglm24.pcf | wc -c
	 67.6%
	 336377 
     arm32:
	nbftp:X11/fonts/misc 233> gzip -9v < hanglm24.pcf | wc -c
	 66.5%
	 347029 

 + It seems that some (most?) ports aren't compressing the fonts as much
   as they could be.  For examples, this is from an arm32 font:

	nbftp:X11/fonts/misc 210> ls -l hanglm24.pcf.gz
	-r--r--r--  1 simonb  simonb  353568 Apr  4 21:32 hanglm24.pcf.gz
	nbftp:X11/fonts/misc 211> zcat hanglm24.pcf.gz | gzip -9 > hanglm24.pcf.gz9
	nbftp:X11/fonts/misc 212> ls -l hanglm24.pcf.gz9 
	-rw-rw-r--  1 simonb  simonb  347029 May  1 04:54 hanglm24.pcf.gz9

   I have GZIP=-9 in my environment, but a proper fix would seem to be
   changing Imake.tmpl from:
	#define GzipCmd gzip
   to
	#define GzipCmd gzip -9
   Any objections to changing this if it works after I "make World" in
   xsrc?

These last two add up to some size differences between xfont set sizes
(i386 and cyrillic fonts ignored for now):

	nbftp:~ftp/pub/NetBSD 237> ls -ls NetBSD-1.4*/*/binary/sets/xfont.tgz | sort -n
	 5656 -rw-rw-r--  1 simonb   netbsd  5786684 Apr 23 20:14 NetBSD-1.4_BETA/pmax/binary/sets/xfont.tgz
	 5656 -rw-rw-r--  1 simonb   simonb  5786635 Apr 18 16:31 NetBSD-1.4_ALPHA/pmax/binary/sets/xfont.tgz
	 5728 -rw-r--r--  1 ross     wheel   5860576 Apr 18 22:25 NetBSD-1.4_ALPHA/alpha/binary/sets/xfont.tgz
	 5800 -r--r--r--  1 thomas   netbsd  5937804 Apr 22 13:19 NetBSD-1.4_BETA/atari/binary/sets/xfont.tgz
	 5800 -rw-r--r--  1 is       netbsd  5937695 Apr 30 04:30 NetBSD-1.4_BETA/amiga/binary/sets/xfont.tgz
	 5800 -rw-r--r--  1 mark     mark    5936896 Apr 26 01:35 NetBSD-1.4_BETA/arm32/binary/sets/xfont.tgz
	 5800 -rw-r--r--  1 minoura  netbsd  5938382 Apr  6 05:20 NetBSD-1.4_ALPHA/x68k/binary/sets/xfont.tgz
	 5800 -rw-r--r--  1 minoura  netbsd  5938444 Apr 23 22:17 NetBSD-1.4_BETA/x68k/binary/sets/xfont.tgz
	 5800 -rw-r--r--  1 pk       netbsd  5937386 Apr 27 23:03 NetBSD-1.4_BETA/sparc/binary/sets/xfont.tgz
	 5800 -rw-r--r--  1 tsubai   netbsd  5936419 Apr  5 07:00 NetBSD-1.4_ALPHA/macppc/binary/sets/xfont.tgz
	 5800 -rw-r--r--  1 tsubai   netbsd  5936458 Apr 23 20:39 NetBSD-1.4_BETA/macppc/binary/sets/xfont.tgz
	 5800 -rw-rw-r--  1 mark     mark    5936227 Apr  4 23:36 NetBSD-1.4_ALPHA/arm32/binary/sets/xfont.tgz
	 6032 -rw-r--r--  1 perry    netbsd  6172068 Apr  5 19:02 NetBSD-1.4_ALPHA/i386/binary/sets/xfont.tgz

I realise that this can't be changed for 1.4, but there's some questions
for later.


Now, for the impact on the release notes.  Each port's man set
contains a different set of man pages for port-specific drivers (ISTR
that we were going to ship an MI man set???).  This and the xfont
differences mean that having a single number for each set size in
distrib/notes/common/contents is misleading for this release.  I'll
change it to an MD list like each other set based on the latest release
snapshot for each port for now.

Longer term, one option is to autogenerate set sizes somehow, and maybe
sucked them into the contents file from some sort of external table.
Are there any suggestions on how to do this or other ways of handling
the problem?

Simon.