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

[Alex]

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

>> From: Alex <agrambot@gmail.com>
>> Cc: Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>,  33880@debbugs.gnu.org
>> Date: Thu, 14 Mar 2019 10:23:16 -0600
>> 
>> 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?
>
> FWIW, I use those "stale" NEWS files all the time, because I
> frequently need to establish what was a version of Emacs where some
> feature was first introduced or announced.

Oh, I didn't mean that "no one uses these dusty old files", but rather
"no one often uses these files outside of Emacs". If you view them in
Emacs, then `auto-compression-mode' decompresses the files on the fly. I
think compression here is less of an issue than it is for Emacs Lisp
files, which are already compressed and used for source code lookup all
the time.