Hi Colin, On 2025-12-25T11:06:34-0800, Russ Allbery wrote: > Alejandro Colomar 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. Ping. Have a lovely day! Alex > > 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) --