Package: apt Version: 0.5.4 This directory takes up a lot of space, but the packages files it contains are highly compressible (about 75% can be saved on one of my systems). This may not be much of an issue on large modern machines but I still have one system which is short of disk space.
Space may not be the only consideration. I recall that when the idea of compressing man pages originally came up on debian-devel, tests showed that the compressed versions actually rendered faster even on a 486: the reduction in disk access required more than compensated for the extra CPU used. Of course this is a different application, so the results may differ, but it could be worth investigating. ttfn/rjk
