Bug#515601: lintian: false positive changelog-file-not-compressed if corresponding file is small

[Micha Lenk <micha@lenk.info>]

Package: lintian
Version: 1.24.2.1
Severity: normal

Hi,

in chapter 12.3 the policy says:

    "Any additional documentation that comes with the package may be installed
  at the discretion of the package maintainer. Plain 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."

This bug report is about the last four words of this paragraph: If a provided
plain text file is small it does not need to get compressed. Regardless of this
exception Lintian complains about such files with a
changelog-file-not-compressed error.

For the records: Debhelper (dh_compress) considers files smaller than 4k
(typical file system block size) to be "small".

Regards
  Micha

-- System Information:
Debian Release: 5.0
  APT prefers stable
  APT policy: (500, 'stable'), (50, 'unstable')
Architecture: i386 (i686)

Kernel: Linux 2.6.26-1-686 (SMP w/2 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=de_DE.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=de_DE.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash

Versions of packages lintian depends on:
ii  binutils            2.18.1~cvs20080103-7 The GNU assembler, linker and bina
ii  diffstat            1.45-2               produces graph of changes introduc
ii  dpkg-dev            1.14.25              Debian package development tools
ii  file                4.26-1               Determines file type using "magic"
ii  gettext             0.17-4               GNU Internationalization utilities
ii  intltool-debian     0.35.0+20060710.1    Help i18n of RFC822 compliant conf
ii  libparse-debianchan 1.1.1-2              parse Debian changelogs and output
ii  libtimedate-perl    1.1600-9             Time and date functions for Perl
ii  liburi-perl         1.35.dfsg.1-1        Manipulates and accesses URI strin
ii  man-db              2.5.2-4              on-line manual pager
ii  perl [libdigest-sha 5.10.0-19            Larry Wall's Practical Extraction 

lintian recommends no packages.

Versions of packages lintian suggests:
ii  binutils-multiarch  2.18.1~cvs20080103-7 Binary utilities that support mult
ii  libtext-template-pe 1.44-1.2             Text::Template perl module
ii  man-db              2.5.2-4              on-line manual pager

-- no debconf information