blueboxes.rktd.gz files are not added to blueboxes-cache

[donm]

I don't know if this is normal or just a peculiarity of Debian or Ubuntu packaging, but in the /usr/share/doc/racket there are many blueboxes.rktd.gz files. It seems like the compressed files are not being read when running make-bluueboxes-cache.

I tested by copying /usr/share/doc/racket/reference/blueboxes.rktd.gz to my desktop, and running

(define tag (xref-binding->definition-tag (load-collections-xref) #'dict-ref 0)) 
(fetch-blueboxes-strs tag #:blueboxes-cache 
    (make-blueboxes-cache #t #:blueboxes-dirs (list (string->path "/home/don/desktop/"))))

When the blueboxes file is compressed, this results in #f, but when the blueboxes file is uncompressed the result is what you would hope:

'("procedure"
  "(dict-ref dict key [failure-result]) -> any"
  "  dict : dict?"
  "  key : any/c"
  "  failure-result : (failure-result/c any/c)"
  "                 = (lambda () (raise (make-exn:fail ....)))")

I came across this while trying to figure out why the xrepl ,describe command wasn't showing the documentation for many commands.

[rfindler]

I think the problem is that they were gzipped. How did that happen and why would someone gzip random parts of our distribution?

[donm]

I just double checked to make sure it also occurs in the default repositories because I was using the Racket team's ppa (https://launchpad.net/~plt/+archive/ubuntu/racket). But yes, it seems like the files are compressed in the official repositories as well. This is all on Ubuntu 16.04. Maybe @takikawa would know what's happening during packaging.

[takikawa]

Thanks for the report. This probably means that the Debian packaging (and Ubuntu) should use DEB_DH_COMPRESS_ARGS or DEB_COMPRESS_EXCLUDE in CDBS to specify that blueboxes should never be compressed. (Actually it may be better to go one step further and say no rkt or rktd files should be compressed)

(I can't look into this immediately, but I'll try to fix it and submit a fix upstream to Debian)

[rfindler]

Are they any files that are part of our distribution that can be randomly compressed?!?

[takikawa]

This bug should now be fixed in the latest version of the PPA (for v6.7) which is now up. I've submitted the patch upstream to the Debian maintainer so it should get fixed there too.