Re: Stop archive bloat: 47MB gmt-coast-full_19991001-1.deb

[Philippe Troin <phil@fifi.org>]

Kevin Bullock <kbullock@ringworld.org> writes:

> <randomthoughts>
> Build-at-install kept me from installing TeX before we went to teTeX. I
> just couldn't stand to sit there for 3 days watching it build metafonts.
> Documentation is good to have, but do we need it in tex, ps, info, html,
> sgml, rtf, pdf, and every other document format ever created? Everything
> seems to be moving to HTML. latex2html is a Good Thing(tm). In my perfect
> world, I could write a documentation.texi file, then tex it for printed
> output, compile it for info browsing, and run latex2html to browse it
> through http://localhost/doc/. Don't know if this is possible. Maybe
> build-at-install is the answer. That would alleviate the distro bloat, but
> not the local installed bloat (I care much less about local). Perhaps we
> then give the user a choice (through dinstall or debconf) about their
> preferred documentation format, so they have the option of only building
> docs in that format.
> </randomthoughts>

No. HTML AND source. Whatever it is. Not pure HTML. This way, people
would be able to derive any document form they like (info, postscript,
etc). 

Eventually, what you say is the ultimate: ship the source only and
build on install the preferred documentation format...

But right now, we should include both HTML and whatever source the
document is in.

Phil.