Re: Liberty-eiffel Digest, Vol 52, Issue 1

[Paolo Redaelli]

Il 06/01/22 09:17, Hans Zwakenberg ha scritto:
> > What's interesting is that all those are really compressible, packed
> > into a tar.xz those 449mb shrink to a mere 2,9Mb. As far as I can say
> > these static pages could be **temporarily** acceptable.
> If these help files can be packed to less than 3 MB, wouldn't it be enough to 
> only distribute the packed help file together with a front end that pulls the 
> needed pages from the packed file on demand?

We could but I think that it is not worth the effort.

Let me explain.

Most other languages have documentation packages that are compressed and 
expand several times.

Some examples:

- openjdk-18-doc 13,0MB unpacks to 290MB

- python3.9-doc 11,1MB unpacks to 57,6MB

Our build_debian.sh today produces  3,0 MB of documentation packages.

I acknowledge that to most of people born in the previous millennium our 
current way of documenting code is a "waste" of some hundred megabytes. 
It seems that most people don't care about it anymore.