Re: Deleting uncompressed Info/Doc files at upgrades
On Tue, Oct 20, 1998 at 03:12:20PM -0400, Dale Scheetz wrote:
> On Tue, 20 Oct 1998, Stephen J. Carpenter wrote:
>
> > What I consider more important is this...
> > I think /usr/doc does need some special handling. Specifically...
> > in the case that I don't want a /usr/doc (ie this is a machine that I am
> > never going to need documentation on...and small filesystem size is the
> > major imperitive)
>
> While I can agree with what you say here, this doesn't address the issue
> as I understand what is being asked for. I should also point out that,
> although there are plenty of examples and yes, real documentation, in
> /usr/doc, most documentation is in /usr/man and /usr/info (which are also
> gzipped). Most of what is in /usr/doc/ is copyrights and changelogs.
True...hmm well on such a system as I think of I wouldn't want
mane etc either...
> The real question that seems to be asked by this thread comes from the
> desire of the sysadmin to have control over whether or not the files in
> these places (/usr/doc/ /usr/man/ /usr/info) are compressed or not.
>
> There are good arguments for either position. Small disk space systems are
> desperate to have as much compressed as possible. Systems without this
> constraint tend to host large volumes of users, with lots of traffic to
> and from the disk. These systems are better served by having these files
> uncompressed, so other resources (like cpu time, disk activity, etc...)
> can be freed up to deal with the needs of these multible users.
>
> Debian policy is to compress these files. Debian always looks for the
> greatest good for the greatest number of users, and disk space is still a
> least common denominator for such decissions.
Hmm well...thinking about it now...
I would prefer these be uncompressed in packages (I know its trivial but...
why compress files just to put them in a larger compressed file?) and
have dpkg compress them at install time (or not)
This would have the added benefit that if policy changes that the default
should now be compressed with foozip instead of gzip, all thats requred
is a dpkg update to change it for all packages.
Maybe dpkg needs some sort of sitewide configuration for how it should
act on things like this? Allow default flags etc? Of course I havn't
had time to look at dpkg source code so I have no idea how hard that
would be to impliment.
> However, we should also listen to system administrators, as they have more
> to do with the use of our product in "real world" situations than the
> single user with an old, small, machine.
definitly agreed.
> I tend to agree that dpkg is not the right place to deal with this
> problem. It is really a system configuration problem, and as such needs a
> system configuration tool to deal with it.
Well I agree that deleting "leftovers" isn't dpkg's job per se
but on the more general problem of whether all docs should be compressed
or not...this is something that would need to be done each time a package
is installed...
-Steve
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