Bug#664794: lintian: should we compress some collections (file-info and index)?

[Niels Thykier <niels@thykier.net>]

Source: lintian
Version: 2.5.6
Severity: wishlist

I have been considering if it would be a good idea to (conditionally?)
compress certain collection files.  In some cases they are actually
rather large and I suspect compression will generally be good in such
cases[1].  Admittedly, there are also cases where it gives little to
no size reduction.

Code-wise, we should be able to able this for file-info without any
greater hassle than updating L::Collect::Package and coll/file-info.
There are still some "ad-hoc" index parsers left in coll/*, but it
should be fairly straight forward to fix.

However, there has been people doing things like "grep -r $expression"
on the lab in the past[2] and compression could break some of these.

~Niels

For reference, the size of the lab pool is 16 (13) GB according to
 du -sh (--apparent-size)


[1]

$ wc -c < e/eclipse/eclipse_3.7.2-1_source/file-info
4600773
$ gzip --best -c < e/eclipse/eclipse_3.7.2-1_source/file-info  | wc -c
277286
$ wc -c < e/eclipse/eclipse_3.7.2-1_source/index
5462164
$ gzip --best -c < e/eclipse/eclipse_3.7.2-1_source/index  | wc -c
390669


[2] Such as (but not limited to) the Policy Maintainers :)

http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=dbnpolicy/policy.git;a=blob;f=tools/license-count