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.
* dh_compress doesn't compress some other files based on extension
including .zip files. PDF (to my knowledge) uses zip internally to
compress the document. So why PDF should be gzipped if .zip not?
* 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 (?)
* 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
* 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.
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?
* Is there already a clear policy/dev-ref/practices statement on how to
deal with PDFs? Should we make such?
* If we should enforce one way, shouldn't we adjust linda/lintian rules
to inform the maintainer?
* May be there is a way for facsimile re-compression of the existing PDFs
with higher compression ratio?
Thank you in advance
[1] http://lists.debian.org/debian-mentors/2006/05/msg00098.html
[2] http://www.onerussian.com/Linux/questions/pdf.sid.ia64.txt
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