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Re: PDF files and dh_compress



On Tue, May 09, 2006 at 01:15:54PM -0400, Yaroslav Halchenko wrote:
> Dear Developers,
> 
> I've raised this discussion at -mentors first [1] but I think it is worth
> asking on a devel list since no definite decision was reached and I
> could not find similar discussion in the archives.
> 
> I've got annoyed enough by compressed pdf.gz in -doc packages
> that I decided to check if that is required (deb pol, or dev ref?)
> and/org common practice.
> 
> The facts are:
> 
> * the policy states in 12.3 Additional documentation:
> 
>  *Text documentation* should be installed in the directory
>   /usr/share/doc/package, where package is the name of the package, and
>    compressed with gzip -9 unless it is small.
>  
>  My take on that is that "text documentation" referred to uncompressed
>  text files which definitely should be compressed. But PDF can be
>  referred as text documentation with the same success as png with text
>  in it.
>  
> * Although there is  a way to view pdf.gz without explicit decompression
>   (use see or xzpdf) it is inconvenient for being used from firefox for
>   instance (?)

Could you point us to a bug report ? firefox being a web browser is likely
to be used to download .pdf.gz files from non-Debian source, so changing
Debian practice will not remove the need for that support.

> * There is no general agreement of either PDF should be gzipped or not.
>   There are 1250 pdf and 1068 pdf.gz file shipped with sid distribution
>   (please see [2] for more details). Possible reasons for present
>   disagreement is due to the lack of clear statement in the policy
>   or in dev reference or best practices. Also I believe neither lintian
>   nor linda warns about present pdf or pdf.gz files

I would not mind letting the maintainer decide whether compressing the
PDF in the package will achieve a significant saving (policy 12.3 says:
... unless it is small), whether the package work with compressed PDF
etc.

> * If we decide to allow pdf being installed uncompressed (which would be
>   my wish) we would occupy additional 153M to current 299M (see [2]) on
>   all of them on a sid system. If we rule opposite -- to keep them all
>   in .gz, then we would free up 50M.

Is that correct ?

Total uncompressed PDF: 299M+153M=452M
Total   compressed PDF: 299M-50M =244M
Compression ratio: (452-244)/452= 46%

A stat I would like to see is the compression ratio for the 
PDF that are shipped compressed compared to the compression ratio for the 
PDF that are shipped uncompressed.


> Now the questions are:
> 
> * Should we enforce the single way (pdf vs pdf.gz), or keep as it is now
>   without any agreement and up to the maintainer?

46% is sufficient for making compression worthwhile in my opinion.
However I prefer to rely on the judgement of the maintainer than to
force one way on the other.

Cheers,
-- 
Bill. <ballombe@debian.org>

Imagine a large red swirl here.



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