Comment 6 for bug 77138

> No, the necessity to learn different commands (if someone wrote them) because none of the standard Unix text tools is usable (on supposedly text files) shows that it is a serious issue.[...]
> Beagle is not useful for searching[...]
> I don't understand what's good on complicating of reading the files.[...]
> And please don't try to argue PNG files are compressed internally[...]

This is twisting the issue to your liking and ignoring the arguments I'm giving: the fact is unix commands are meant to be combined, and *no* you can't expect "grep -r" to search in all possible formats, even formats transporting text such as PDF or MSWord; heck, you can't even grep on HTML files for anything else than small ASCII words.

Stop thinking that the only constraint on the files of a system is to be able to "grep -r" them. I explained why the space savings are an advantage in some cases and that we try to adapt the tools to handle these. By your logic, we wouldn't use tar files because they hide individual files from standard commands such as cp and wget.

The reason I mentionned Beagle or PNG is that we are not living in a text file world; even index.sgml files aren't plain text: they are SGML; try searching for "Loïc" when it's spelled as Loï or whatever. We're living in a format in format in format world (make that recursive).

>> Why HTML files aren't compressed?
> So, why they aren't?

I see you insist on getting an answer as if I didn't reply already: some HTML files are compressed as dpkg -S html.gz will show you; there's no need to compress in the http:// case, this is why you don't see them compressed on the web; I already answered that http was already zipping the contents.

> evince /usr/share/doc/tetex-doc/programs/dvips.pdf.gz

I'm sorry it doesn't work for you under Ubuntu; Debian fixed the list of MIME types listed in the evince.desktop files, and it works fine under Debian. I'm sure this will reach Ubuntu soon.

> After all the years of experience with compressed documentation in Debian no one can convince me it makes sense.
> And conversely, Debian people seem to be incapable of admitting any fundamental problems.

This is because you don't wont to read the actual arguments people are making: saving space is still an issue for example in live CDs, embedded systems (where one still has to ship some files such as copyrights), or simply to email them; zipping still provides a speed advantage when the CPU is mostly idle while the disk is a bottleneck. I already wrote this, but you simply ignore the existence of the advantages.

Now, as I already said, I can live with the fact that the inventors of gtk-doc index.sgml files do not want to impose to tools the support of zipped files, and we can diverge from the default of zipping everything to explicitly exclude these files (even if I think it's not the best solution in the interest of Debian and our users), but please do not argue that "Debian can not convince it makes sense" or that "Debian is incapable of admitting any fundamental problem". I think I proved above that there are valid use cases for compression, it's omnipresent (in protocols, file types, or in file systems as you noted), and that I'm willing to try to avoid compressing gtk-doc index.sgml files if it's the desire of gtk-doc upstream.

(This is especially true since issues with index.sgml.gz files were never reported to Debian.)