Re: [proposal] remove the requirement to compress documentation

[Michael Gilbert <michael.s.gilbert@gmail.com>]

On Mon, Feb 20, 2012 at 2:22 AM, 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.
>
> 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.

Since compressed docs will always be around (even if this proposal
were to be approved), a more robust solution would be a broad set of
tools that support those files in that form.  This has already been
mentioned, but we've already done that for xpdf.  It will load a
.pdf.[gz,bz2,xz] without any additional burden/forethought on the
user.

In that sense, the policy requirements don't need to be changed, the tools do.

Best wishes,
Mike