As probably many Debian users will (since many of the documentation files in /usr/share/doc are automatically compressed), I'd often like to open a .pdf.gz file without having to decompress it first. And I'd actually like to use Gnomes "evince" viewer, since it has a rather lean UI (I hate the xpdf UI).

There is at least one bug in Debian wishing this feature, and at least five bugs reported in upstream bugzilla (which is rather surprising, since bugzilla is barely useable for non-developers; but it also shows how bad the search function of bugzilla is working with all these duplicates!).

Unfortunately, evince upstream is really ignorant about this need...

Basically all the bugs are closed as being "NOTGNOME", just because there is no freaking mimetype defined by freedesktop for compressed PDF files.

Very user friendly, thanks. Just ignore the bugs, maybe they'll go away. I bet noone of the evince people bothered to file a request with freedesktop to add this mime type, did they?

I guess they just don't want to registern in freedesktops bugzilla either. Just like everybody avoids registering (and filing) with theirs.

I'm happy Debian does not use bugzilla; and the recent additions to debbugs should solve many of the things people were missing.

Updates: yes, I am aware that PDF uses compression internally. Still gzip and bzip2 both reduce file size of the beameruserguide.pdf file to around 63% (bzip2 slighty better). Sure, 3 MB approximately system-wide saved by compressing the preinstalled documentation .pdf files is not much. If you transmit them, it does make a difference. So if you want to store them on a memory stick or a floppy disc (you know, these obsolete squares with only 1.4 MB space on them, where the non-gz beameruserguide would not fit onto).

Apparently Gnome developer Christian Neumair picked up the issue now. Thanks!

Update 2: Sorry for mixing two rants. One rant is about the evince people ignoring their users' request because they want freedesktop to do something first. The second rant is a new revival of my Bugzilla is harmful rant.

It boils down to: On a couple of occassions I did either not report a bug or not report a fix, because bugzilla just did not let me do it without registering. That is why bugzilla is bad for your project.