I noticed that the Xorg (xorg-server) upstream changelog is starting to get a bit large, ChangeLog.gz 341K.
How much sense would there be in using, say, bzip2 compression instead? In this particular example that would reduce ChangeLog.bz2 to 251K, a space saving of 26%. A change like this would require updating Policy 12.7, and tools like debhelper would need to be updated to take advantage of it. For reference, the total sum of all /usr/share/doc/*/changelog.gz files on my system is 43890 Kb (43 Mb). Using bzip2 might reduce that to around 31Mb. The largest changelog.gz (on my system, using 'find /usr/share/doc -name changelog.gz -printf "%s %p\n" | sort -nr' ) come from wine (12 packages) 558 Kb lynx 341 Kb debian-keyring 286 cmake 280 hal (4 packages) 280 libdirectfb-0.9-25 264 gnome-vfs2 (4 packages) 256 apache2 (3 packages) 230 dia-common 220 libcairo2 (3 packages) 214 gnash (2 packages) 201 gnash-tools 201 libgnash0 201 libsablevm-classlib1 (2 packages) 201 libsablevm-native1 201 pwlib (4 packages) 200 etc. etc. Of course, changing compression policy would also reduce the size of other compressed doc files than just changelog.gz. I'm not sure if it's really worth it, especially since not every package has changelogs the size of Xorg's or wine's (hence I'm not filing a bug about it), but I thought it might be interesting to raise the question to see what others think. Drew p.s. for reference, previous discussions on package compression (not doc compression) were made at http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2005/12/msg00759.html and http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2007/04/msg00291.html The difference of course concerns the storage size of the archive vs. the storage size of an installed system. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
