Re: Deleting uncompressed Info/Doc files at upgrades
Quoting Hamish Moffatt (hamish@debian.org):
> On Mon, Oct 19, 1998 at 10:16:50PM +1000, Peter Moulder wrote:
> > It can be such a pain mucking about with gzipped files. zless is
> > simply not as good as less. Where's zgcc?
>
> Maybe not, but with lesspipe, it is just the same :-)
Except that this isn't the default. I'm beginning to agree with the
anti-compression people to some extent: I'm starting to think that the
stuff in /usr/doc _shouldn't_ be compressed per policy. I think this is
one of those UI issues that seperates experienced users from new users:
people who have been working with this stuff for a while know the
tricks, but someone installing for the first time might not. I wonder if
it makes sense to complicated access to _documentation_. I never
imagined that compressessing docs would confuse people, but seeing that
it does makes compression seem like a bad design choice.
With this in mind, I uncompressed my docs and found that they take 57M
(excluding the doc-rfc directory, which is huge and optional anyway, and
the HOWTO directory, because it's also huge and optional IIRC.) The same
subset takes about 28M compressed. Of the remaining, ddd takes 6M, and
could probably be broken into a seperate ddd-doc package. bind takes 3M,
but I have the optional bind-doc package installed. There are couple of
other big packages that could be broken off into seperate doc-packages.
The bottom line is that on a machine with 700M of packages,
uncompressing the docs would cost about 20M for the required subset of
documentation. On a machine with fewer packages, it would cost less.
Given the apparant UI issues involved with compressing, I don't see
that as prohibitive.
Mike Stone
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