Bug#660705: [proposal] remove the requirement to compress documentation
On Tue, Feb 21, 2012 at 12:51:42AM +0100, Wouter Verhelst wrote:
> Package: debian-policy
> Version: 3.9.2
> Severity: wishlist
>
> On Mon, Feb 20, 2012 at 09:17:16PM +0100, Iustin Pop wrote:
> > 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.
There also was discussion on debian-policy, but unfortunately it did not get
forwarded to this bug report.
> > > 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.
I think stopping to compress documentation would be unfortunate.
Accessing directly to the documentation in /usr/share/doc is almost
always a last recourse when other attempts to find the documentation
failed. Using man or info is almost always preferable.
Thus it is very seldom accessed, but since plain text compress very well,
keeping the files around does not waste much space.
> > > 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.
Hard disk size, maybe. But more and more systems are using SSD and SD card which
are much smaller. My laptop has a 128G SSD and my rasberry pi has a 16G SD card.
> > > - 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.
Well, in practice tools deal correctly with compressed file.
Both gv policy.ps.gz and xpdf policy.pdf.gz works. So does
lynx policy-1.html.gz. So there is no need for the user to know
about the 'z version' of them.
But anyway, this policy is restricted to plain text documentation:
<<
Plain text documentation should be compressed with <tt>gzip
-9</tt> unless it is small.
>>
so this is not in scope.
Cheers,
--
Bill. <ballombe@debian.org>
Imagine a large red swirl here.
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