Debian gripes

[Drake Diedrich]

   Another reason Debian tends to separate documentation from binaries is
that documentation is architecture independent, unlike binaries. With 11
architectures, this separation save a significant amount of diskspace and
bandwidth on the 80+ mirrors.  No other Linux distribution distributes so
many binaries from one source, so none of the others would benefit from
splitting their packages as finely as Debian does (there have been threads
on debian-devel suggesting several approaches to even finer grained packages
- language specific, absolutely-bare of docs, lists of big
architecture-dependent packages that could benefit from splitting out the
architecture independent stuff, ...).  Source-only distribution doesn't (in
the opinion of many Debian leaders) work as well as source+binaries: a lot
of bugs turn up on the alternate architectures, either at build or run time. 
Many of those alternate architectures are very underpowered, and best handed
binaries rather than source.  Imagine compiling X or gcc on a PDA.