Re: Deleting uncompressed Info/Doc files at upgrades
On Friday 2 October 1998, at 11 h 55, the keyboard of Peter S Galbraith
<GalbraithP@dfo-mpo.gc.ca> wrote:
> To me, a uncompressed version of a file is still the same file.
> To me, copying an uncompressed info file to /usr/local/info *is* leaving
> crud all over the disk.
Yes, the current Debian system is really inconvenient. Each time you want to
do something useful with a documentation (print it, grep it, glimpse it, vi
it, remember that not every program is able to read compressed files and "zcat
file.gz | program" is not always the simplest thing to do), you have to copy
it to an /usr/local. If the purpose of compressing documenattion was to save
disk space, this failed! We have now the compressed and the uncompressed
version on the disk.
And it does not follow the principle of least surprise, judging by the number
of beginners (including myself) who had the surprise reported by Peter.
In the mean time, as a packager, I prefer to leave documentation uncompressed.
> Sure, it's a special case. Sure dpkg should have to be changed, or maybe
> /var/lib/dpkg/info/*.list file could have regular expressions, like:
>
> /usr/info/emacs-e20-2(.gz)?
It seems a good idea and it will work with bzip2 as well.
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