Re: [proposal] remove the requirement to compress documentation
On 2012-02-20, Wouter Verhelst <wouter@debian.org> wrote:
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> Hi,
>
> During a recent discussion on debian-devel about multiarch, it was shown
> that gzip does not always produce the exact same output from a given
> input file.
>
> While it was shown that removing the requirement to compress
> documentation would not solve the issue (i.e., the problem was larger
> than just the compressed files), I still think removing the requirement
> to compress files is a good thing to do.
>
> Rationale:
> - While I'm sure compressing files would have been a useful thing to do
> in the days of 500MB-harddisks, the same is no longer true for today's
> hundreds-of-gigabytes harddisks. A simple test[1] shows that the
> increase in diskspace is negligible in relation to today's disk sizes.
> - In the cases where the increase in diskspace would be significant,
> i.e. in embedded systems, the best option is to use emdebian, which
> already routinely removes *all* documentation from the system as part
> of the modifications they make to Debian proper; so this change would
> not impact embedded users.
> - Compressing documentation files incurs an additional step on the user
> who wants to read said documentation. Yes, there is zless and zmore.
> However, there is no ziceweasel, zpdf-reader[2] or zgv. Even if such
> tools do exist, we would still require that users either know these
> tools exist and how to get them, or to decompress files before reading
> them.
>
> As such, I believe the requirement to compress files is an anachronism
> that we should get rid of.
seconded.
/Sune
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