Re: Bug#664794: lintian: should we compress some collections (file-info and index)?
On 2012-03-20 23:25, Russ Allbery wrote:
> Niels Thykier <niels@thykier.net> writes:
>
>> I have been considering if it would be a good idea to (conditionally?)
>> compress certain collection files. In some cases they are actually
>> rather large and I suspect compression will generally be good in such
>> cases[1]. Admittedly, there are also cases where it gives little to no
>> size reduction.
>
> Compressing some stuff is not a bad idea. The indices and file-info
> collections seem like the most obvious targets. People doing greps can
> switch to zgreps.
>
> I would prefer to never conditionally compress anything; either always
> compress it or never compress it. That way, the file names and access
> method are always consistent.
>
Okay, I have committed the changes for compressing index + file-info.
As a side-effect, I compressed the control-index as well
(bin-pkg-control) to keep L::Collect side simple.
I had a look at some other candidates and I am thinking that java-info,
copyright-file and md5sums. However, as it is we sometimes just leave
an empty file for these collections (if there is no information etc.).
For copyright-file and java-info this is probably going to be common
case (symlinked u/s/d/$pkg and no jar files respectively).
My personal view is that we could do without the empty files and then
only leave a file if there is any information. It will probably require
some changes to checks (or collections) that access these directly, but
I think we should take that as an oppertunity of improving (the usage
of) L::Collect. :)
~Niels
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