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.
Thoughts?
[1] http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2012/02/msg00340.html
[2] Some PDF readers can transparently read compressed PDF files, but
I don't think this is true for all such software.
--
The volume of a pizza of thickness a and radius z can be described by
the following formula:
pi zz a
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