On Tue, May 09, 2006 at 01:15:54PM -0400, Yaroslav Halchenko wrote: > Dear Developers, > > I've raised this discussion at -mentors first [1] but I think it is worth > asking on a devel list since no definite decision was reached and I > could not find similar discussion in the archives. > > I've got annoyed enough by compressed pdf.gz in -doc packages > that I decided to check if that is required (deb pol, or dev ref?) > and/org common practice. > > The facts are: > > * the policy states in 12.3 Additional documentation: > > *Text documentation* should be installed in the directory > /usr/share/doc/package, where package is the name of the package, and > compressed with gzip -9 unless it is small. > > My take on that is that "text documentation" referred to uncompressed > text files which definitely should be compressed. But PDF can be > referred as text documentation with the same success as png with text > in it. > > * Although there is a way to view pdf.gz without explicit decompression > (use see or xzpdf) it is inconvenient for being used from firefox for > instance (?)
Could you point us to a bug report ? firefox being a web browser is likely to be used to download .pdf.gz files from non-Debian source, so changing Debian practice will not remove the need for that support. > * There is no general agreement of either PDF should be gzipped or not. > There are 1250 pdf and 1068 pdf.gz file shipped with sid distribution > (please see [2] for more details). Possible reasons for present > disagreement is due to the lack of clear statement in the policy > or in dev reference or best practices. Also I believe neither lintian > nor linda warns about present pdf or pdf.gz files I would not mind letting the maintainer decide whether compressing the PDF in the package will achieve a significant saving (policy 12.3 says: ... unless it is small), whether the package work with compressed PDF etc. > * If we decide to allow pdf being installed uncompressed (which would be > my wish) we would occupy additional 153M to current 299M (see [2]) on > all of them on a sid system. If we rule opposite -- to keep them all > in .gz, then we would free up 50M. Is that correct ? Total uncompressed PDF: 299M+153M=452M Total compressed PDF: 299M-50M =244M Compression ratio: (452-244)/452= 46% A stat I would like to see is the compression ratio for the PDF that are shipped compressed compared to the compression ratio for the PDF that are shipped uncompressed. > Now the questions are: > > * Should we enforce the single way (pdf vs pdf.gz), or keep as it is now > without any agreement and up to the maintainer? 46% is sufficient for making compression worthwhile in my opinion. However I prefer to rely on the judgement of the maintainer than to force one way on the other. Cheers, -- Bill. <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Imagine a large red swirl here. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
