Re: /usr/share/doc/ files and gzip/xz/no compression
On 16/08/11 00:10, Carsten Hey wrote:
> bzip2 has a better compression on average for some filetypes, xz[1] has
> a better compression on average for others:
>
> gzip bzip2 xz bzip2+xz[3]
> text files[2] 94312922 73496587 77783076 73496587
> other files 16577181 14609893 14275484 14275484
> sum 110890103 88106480 92058560 87772071
>
> Among the "other files" are also a lot of text files, if we would
> compress Debian packages instead, xz would win presumably.
>
> Anyway, I don't think this difference of 4 MiB on a desktop system is
> significant.
>
>
> I would prefer to avoid bloating the set of pseudo essential packages
> without a good reason and I think users should be able to decompress all
> files in /u/s/d. There are plans to let dpkg depend on liblzma2 instead
> of xz and it already depends on libbz2-1.0. If dpkg's dependency on
> libbz2 is planned to be removed in future, I would prefer to let libbz2
> vanish from the pseudo essential set and use xz also for /u/s/d,
> otherwise I would prefer using bzip2 over xz for /u/s/d.
One advantage of gzip /usr/share/doc is that when served by an
appropriately configured web server .gz files will be transparently
decompressed and displayed by most web browsers. I believe Policy
requires Debian web servers to make /u/s/d available at
http://localhost/doc/. While this obviously isn't an overriding
consideration it is a nice easy way to browse the documentation. Can
same be done for any other compression formats?
Roger
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