Re: [proposal] remove the requirement to compress documentation
On Mon, Feb 20, 2012 at 08:22:52AM +0100, Wouter Verhelst wrote:
> 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.
Hello Wouter,
> 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),
To be honest, I am not sure why you are taking the trouble to bring it up,
under those circumstances.
> 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.
500MB is not negligible. This is 5% of /usr on your system, but this can be higher
on other system with a different package set.
> - 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.
iceweasel handle compressed file fine and so does zxpdf.
> As such, I believe the requirement to compress files is an anachronism
> that we should get rid of.
I do not like removing a useful requirement in exchange for nothing.
Debian is used on small systems where users still like to have documentation, and
support zlib compression is almost universal.
Every Debian stable release has higher diskspace requirement than the previous
one already. Why make it even bigger ?
Cheers,
--
Bill. <ballombe@debian.org>
Imagine a large red swirl here.
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