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List:       koffice
Subject:    Bug#16103: koffice should compress the documents with bzip2 too
From:       Christian Lavoie <clavoi14 () po-box ! mcgill ! ca>
Date:       2000-11-27 1:35:11
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>   Bandwidth can be expensive, but:

Never, _ever_ expect users to fit in any sort of "standard user". They don't.

> -koffice documents will not be accessed in real time. They might be
> attached to mails. People do not notice the arrival time of the
> mails (and the difference will be unsignificant anyhow). However they
> notice the real time access - and they are downloading
> huge amount of uncompressed html/javascript/java crap a day.

Never, _ever_ expect users to fit in any sort of "standard user". They don't.

It maybe that some KOffice documents will be accessed in real-time, it may be 
that KOffice will be used by NASA in space, where every byte takes 4 hours to 
transmit, Who knows?

The point is, don't limit the possibilites because 'nobody uses that today'. 

> -bzip compression might gain some in the pure text (which documents are
> usually small), but it does not gain anything on images.

Of course, we're limiting ourself to text? What about VRML files? These can 
get insanely complex, and still are plain-text encoded. (standard allows 
gzip'ed files). Or the doxygem .xml file describing a _whole_ set of 
librairies? (I right now have at least 4 megs of doxygen doc in .xml 
available. A quick KWord plug-in and one could theoretically document source 
code with KWord)

Point is, again, do not expect people to use KOffice the way you do, the way 
you planned it to be used, etc. 

> -on the other hand bzip is very slow on compression and this would be a
> big performance penalty, which WILL be noticed by the users.

Yes, its a tradeoff: Simple solution: Don't make it the default. Or make BZIP 
compression available only to those who know it exists, or only in insanely 
big text files, or...

I say, go for it, just keep your eyes open to the tradeoffs it implies

-- 
Christian Lavoie
clavoi14@po-box.mcgill.ca
UIN: 947212

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