Re: Stop compressing manual pages

["G. Branden Robinson" <g.branden.robinson@gmail.com>]

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At 2025-12-25T11:06:34-0800, Russ Allbery wrote:
> > Yup, I'd like that policy to change.  I've added debian-policy@ to
> > this mail (and also linux-man@).
>
> The rationale in Debian for compressing documentation in general is
> for embedded systems and other small installations, and it applies to
> just about anything that can be safely compressed (manual pages are
> only one example).  But this rule also predates such facilities as the
> nodoc build profile, and is several decades old and thus predates the
> growth in storage size even in small embedded environments that has
> significantly outpaced the size of text-adjacent documents.  I would
> definitely want to get feedback from embedded folks before changing
> this rule, but at least at first glance it sounds like a reasonable
> request worth considering.

I'd add that, in contrast to the mid-1990s when Debian's man page
compression policy was promulgated--my recollection is that it was an
early, early decision, already in place when I started using Debian in
January 1996--transparent compression is now an oft-implemented feature
of file systems, including some that are popular in embedded systems,
such as JFFS2, where it's been the case for at least 19 years.[1]

Further, the selection of compression algorithm and container format has
become a popular site for partisan battles over the same.[2][3][4][5][6]
Since Debian already generates sufficient partisan battles over issues
specific to our practices, it might be advantageous to abandon this one.
(Speaking for myself, I find deflate/gzip satisfactory, and I intend to
release groff 1.24.0 as a gzipped tape archive.)

Adopting this change would enable man-db man(1) to discard the
zsoelim(1) tool, simplifying the code base and logic depending on this
tool--but I defer to Colin's judgment of how advantageous that'd be.

Regards,
Branden

[1] https://lwn.net/Articles/219827/
[2] https://linuxreviews.org/Comparison_of_Compression_Algorithms
[3] https://www.nongnu.org/lzip/xz_inadequate.html
[4] https://engineering.fb.com/2016/08/31/core-infra/smaller-and-faster-data-compression-with-zstandard/
[5] https://www.reddit.com/r/archlinux/comments/eiia99/zst_packages_consistently_larger_than_xz/
[6] https://sysdfree.wordpress.com/2020/01/04/293/

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