> After all, these are not that hard to support from Perl

This way of thinking is the source of all the problems.  Sure, it is not
hard to add compression support in a one particular case.  But then then
is another case, then a couple of them, yet another, a few more, and it
never stops.  The complexity of every simple private or one-shot script
that reads these files is considerably increased.

Does grep support searching in compressed files?  Why HTML files aren't
compressed?  Extending every HTML browser in the world to handle
compressed files surely isn't so hard.  The largest 8 compressed files
in /usr/share/doc on my Ubuntu desktop are PDF files -- and do xpdf or
evince support compressed PDF?  Nope.

If Debian developers invested the same effort, that went into
compression of files in /usr/share/doc, extending every program that
needs to read them (failing for every program that is not in Debian and
some of those that are) and fixing related bugs... if this effort was
invested into compression on the file system level, we would have a
working compression in several file systems by now and Debian would save
more disk space.

So, please just stop compressing the files at least in this case.
Adding decompression is a problem.  Not because it is hard, but because
it encourages compression and compression creates a burden for other
people.  I don't want to force everyone who needs to read index.sgml
(which *is* supposed to be machine-readable) to implement decompression
too.

-- 
gtkdoc-fixxref broken by compressed documentation
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/77138
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Bugs, which is the bug contact for Ubuntu.

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