Re: Install run-help and *.zwc files system wide in build system

[Bart Schaefer <schaefer@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Nov 10,  8:57am, Martin Vaeth wrote:
}
} The "documented way" to produce the files for run-help is only
} suboptimal, because:
} 
} 2. It does not work out-of-the box: With current man/groff versions,
} one must export (an empty) GROFF_NO_SGR, MANWIDTH=80, possibly
} unset MANPL, MANROFFSEQ, set utf8-aware locales etc.

Of course the "right" way to go about this would be to generate the
run-help files directly from the yodl source, or at least to generate
formatted output from the yodl that could more easly be split up by
Util/helpfiles.

That would mean creating a "zhelp.yo" file patterned after Doc/zman.yo
and Doc/ztexi.yo plus Makefile.in rules using "yodl -w zhelp.yo ..."
 
} (b) Similarly, it would be nice if zsh would be able to
} install *.zwc files for the functions it provides in the
} build process.

Someone should do (again? I wonder if it ever was done) benchmarking
of whether .zwc files really save any time/CPU.  I'm sure they do for
sets of functions that are all going to be used during the session;
but I'm doubtful that packing a bunch of autoloads, most of which are
never actually loaded, into one big library file, is more effective
than reading the individual files of only the subset that is used.

It certainly doesn't save disk space; in nearly all cases ZWC files
are bigger than their text counterparts, because they have to retain
the original text for XTRACE purposes and no compression is applied.

} Of course, both should happen only if appropriate ./configure
} options are passed (e.g. compiling *.zwc files is only possible
} in the build process if no cross-compilation is happening,
} and building help-files requires tools like man, groff, and perl
} which one should not require just to _build_ a zsh).

This is why the precompiled doc is distributed in a separate tarball
from the shell sources.  If we're going to start building run-help
files (or special Util/helpfiles input) as well, then those will need
to be added to the doc tarball.