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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