I also noticed this problem years ago since I was mantaining Maxima
packages for the Slackware repository. I disabled the compression of info
pages: the size of the package doesn't change, it just needs some more
space when installed, but it's not a big problem. Anyway this problem was
with gzip, I think describe (at least in 2008) was not able to deal with
compressed files at all. I don't know what is the situation now, do you
mean some compression formats work for describe and some other not?
Stefano
2012/12/29 James Cloos <cloos at jhcloos.com>
> I now have my dist use xz(1) to compress compresible files, including
> man and info pages. The breaks maxima's describe functionality.
> Both emacs and info(1) are happy with the xz(1)ed info files.
>
> (I was able to return back to using bzip2(1) just for maxima as an
> interim solution.)
>
> I looked through the code, but I couldn't determine how describe opened
> the bzip2(1)ed (and presumably gzip(1)ed) info pages, so I couldn't write
> a patch to add xz(1).
>
> Can anyone point me in the right direction?
>
> Thanks,
>
> -JimC
> --
> James Cloos <cloos at jhcloos.com> OpenPGP: 1024D/ED7DAEA6
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