[ubuntu-art] Recompressing PNGs to save space?

[Matt Zimmerman]

On Tue, Apr 25, 2006 at 02:03:13AM +0200, Mark Shuttleworth wrote:
> This is a very cool bit of work from Frank Schoep over on
> ubuntu-art at l.u.c that I think might be of interest to ubuntu-devel at .
> Very late for such a pervasive change BUT 15MB is not to be sniffed at.

Thanks for passing this on.

This primarily affects the installed system, which is the least
space-constrained environment.  Both the live environment and the .debs
probably squeeze out most of the gain by compressing the PNGs again (plain
gzip compresses the bloated hwdb-client images [bug #30069] by over 50%), so
we wouldn't gain much space on the CDs.

If we choose the top few offenders and do those, it might be worthwhile, but
recall that most of these images come from upstream, and binary data can't
be patched in the package, so it requires modifications to the build
process.  I think the right way to do this would be to write a tool (or
perhaps patch dh_compress?) to recompress all of the PNGs during the package
build.

-- 
 - mdz