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

[Micha Lenk <micha@lenk.info>]

Russ Allbery schrieb:
> 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.

Thank you for pointing this out. So, you say it's dh_compress that is
failing to compress the ChangeLogs if they are smaller than 4k.

I would agree on reassigning this bug to debhelper.

Regards
  Micha