Re: [proposal] remove the requirement to compress documentation
On Tue, 21 Feb 2012, Wouter Verhelst wrote:
> On Mon, Feb 20, 2012 at 07:09:40PM +0100, Wouter Verhelst wrote:
> > On Mon, Feb 20, 2012 at 06:02:50PM +0100, Bill Allombert wrote:
> > > Debian is used on small systems where users still like to have documentation, and
> > > support zlib compression is almost universal.
> >
> > I would not have any objection against a tool which would compress files
> > upon installation for those users who want it. But I don't think having
> > to compress files inside the .deb package buys us very much anymore.
>
> To be a bit more specific on this: such a tool could be implemented
> fairly trivially with a dpkg trigger. Just register a trigger that
> triggers on any file under /usr/share/doc, and have it call gzip --best
> on the files it is called with.
This is a common misunderstanding with dpkg's file triggers. When the
trigger is activated, you only know that something changed in
/usr/share/doc but you don't know what changed. So it would be a rather
costly operation to rescan all of /usr/share/doc/ just to compress the new
files.
Furthermore, just like Russ said, it's a very bad idea to change files
installed by dpkg. If you change the filename, dpkg won't find the file
when it has to remove the package. (Even if you had only to change the
content, you'd break tools like debsums)
That said, I tend to agree that compressing the documentation is a net
loss nowadays. For the cases where space matters, we have either
dpkg --path-exclude, or we have the possibility to use a filesystem
that compresses data transparently (btrfs, zfs, jffs, etc.).
Cheers,
--
Raphaël Hertzog ◈ Debian Developer
Pre-order a copy of the Debian Administrator's Handbook and help
liberate it: http://debian-handbook.info/liberation/
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