Re: Stop compressing manual pages

[Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org>]

Alejandro Colomar <alx@kernel.org> writes:
> On Thu, Dec 25, 2025 at 02:47:33PM +0100, Dr. Tobias Quathamer wrote:
>> Am 25.12.25 um 12:20 schrieb Alejandro Colomar:

>>> Indeed, compressed manual pages are a pain to work with.  You can't use
>>> regular Unix tools to work with them.  With uncompressed manual pages,
>>> You can go to /usr/share/man, and run a pipe of programs to do a complex
>>> search.  With tools like zgrep(1) and zcat(1), you can do some stuff,
>>> but not everything.

[...]

>> thanks for your bug report and the provided statistics. I haven't thought
>> about this up until now, because it violates Debian Policy. Quoting from
>> Section 12.1
>> (https://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-docs.html#manual-pages):
>> 
>> "Manual pages should be installed compressed using gzip -9."

[...]

> Yup, I'd like that policy to change.  I've added debian-policy@ to this
> mail (and also linux-man@).

Colin, do you have an opinion on this as the man-db maintainer? The
software you maintain is probably the primary consumer by a significant
margin of the installed manual pages.

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.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org)              <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>