Re: *-doc package should not gzip PDF file

[Preben Randhol <randhol@pvv.org>]

Paul Wise <pabs3@bonedaddy.net> wrote on 26/06/2006 (05:08) :
> On Sun, 2006-06-25 at 16:51 -0400, James R. Van Zandt wrote:
> 
> > >   I have no idea how debhelper works. Are there anybody out there that
> > >   can help with getting it to stop gzipping files in -doc?
> > 
> > dh_compress already has a list of file extensions where (re-)compressing
> > doesn't make sense.  I've submitted Bug#375406 with a patch (below) to
> > add .pdf to the list.
> 
> If I read the discussion correctly up to this point, some PDFs are
> fairly compressible and some are not. Perhaps dh_compress could evaluate
> this for each .pdf and only compress those files where the saving is
> significant (say 40%)?

Why this space saving concern for -doc packages? I really don't get it.
If you want to save space gzip all html files and make web browsers work
out-of-the-box with gzipped html files. If a pdf file is huge because of
lack of internal compression then isn't it better to use a tool that
compresses internally than to fix the symptoms?

Anyway I'm asking for user friendliness.

As for the statistics that has been brought up. Are there +3000 pdf
files in the doc-packages of Debian?

Preben