Re: Comments on policy modifications

[Richard Braakman <dark@xs4all.nl>]

Manoj Srivastava wrote:
> Hi,
> >>"Guy" == Guy Maor <maor@debian.org> writes:
> 
>  Guy> Zed Pobre <zed@moebius.interdestination.com> writes:
>  >> Compressed html changelogs:
> 
>  Guy> dwww deals transparently with compressed html files.  Why can't
>  Guy> html changelogs be compressed then?
> 
> 	Actually, so can lynx, MOzilla, netscape, and w3. I take back
>  my objection. I did not realize that all the html browsers too
>  transparently handle gzipped files

Oh... then this is a new thing :)  I maintain several packages that
install their html documentation uncompressed, because compressed
html was useless.  I imagine I'm not the only one.  

Section 5.3 says this:

     Any additional documentation that comes with the package can be
     installed at the discretion of the package maintainer. Text
     documentation should be installed in a directory `/usr/doc/<package>',
     where <package> is the name of the package, and compressed with `gzip
     -9' unless it is small.

Note that it says "text documentation", perhaps because that gzips
better than for example jpegs.  That does not say what to do with
non-text documentation, and it leaves intermediate formats (such as
tex, html, ps) unspecified.  I think this paragraph should be
rewritten, but I have no specific ideas on how to rewrite it.

Hmm, I just did some testing, at at least lynx won't follow a link to
a ".html" url if there is only a ".html.gz" file.  So compressing a
directory of html files will break all its internal links.

Richard Braakman