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/ -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-policy-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20120221080142.gb22...@rivendell.home.ouaza.com
