Subject: Re: bug#33880: [PATCH] Compress past NEWS files during installation

From: Alex <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 14 Mar 2019 10:23:16 -0600

Michael Albinus <[email-masked]> writes:

> Eli Zaretskii <[email-masked]> writes:
>
>> As for NEWS, I don't have a strong opinion, but it sounds like a very
>> small gain for the trouble.  What do others think?  Perhaps this
>> should be discussed on emacs-devel first.
>
> IIRC, Stefan wrote a small code snippet which scans NEWS files and tries
> to determine, when a Lisp object was added to Emacs. I don't know
> whether this would still work with compressed NEWS files.

It should work similarly to scanning *.el.gz files. Depending on how the
snippet was made (e.g., with a regex that accepts *.gz NEWS files), it
might even work with no changes.

> Given, that disk space of 1 MB is nothing today, I'm not in favour of
> such a compression. I don't know what it is good for, honestly.

It's indeed barely anything, but I also don't see much of a reason to
not do it. If we're already compressing a bunch of files, why not
compress the stale NEWS files at the same time?