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

[Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org>]

Micha Lenk <micha@lenk.info> writes:

> 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".

You missed the portion specifically about changelog files in 12.7:

    All of these files should be installed compressed using gzip -9, as
    they will become large with time even if they start out small.

There is no "unless it is small" Policy exception for changelog files,
only for other documentation files.  This is, among other things, so that
the changelog files retain a stable name across packages; they're always
changelog.gz and changelog.Debian.gz.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org)               <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>