Re: Stop compressing manual pages

[Alejandro Colomar <alx@kernel.org>]

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Hi Colin,

On 2026-04-20T11:14:52+0100, Colin Watson wrote:
> On Thu, Dec 25, 2025 at 11:06:34AM -0800, Russ Allbery wrote:
> > Alejandro Colomar <alx@kernel.org> writes:
> > > On Thu, Dec 25, 2025 at 02:47:33PM +0100, Dr. Tobias Quathamer wrote:
> > >> 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.
> 
> Sorry for being slow to reply to this.
> 
> It's not something I feel as strongly about as Alejandro: in man-db 
> we've already paid most of the costs (in terms of software complexity) 
> of making compressed manual pages work well, and we'll have to keep that 
> code around for the foreseeable future no matter what.  But it's true 
> that there are continuing annoyances with ad-hoc shell pipelines.
> 
> Let's put it this way: as man-db maintainer, I have no objection to 
> recommending uncompressed manual pages.  Sort of +0 or +0.5.

Thanks!

>  I 
> definitely agree that embedded folks ought to be consulted, if they 
> aren't already simply excluding manual pages entirely.

Does anyone know how to contact them?  Could you please add them to CC
(some key people and/or a mailing list)?


Have a lovely night!
Alex

> 
> -- 
> Colin Watson (he/him)                              [cjwatson@debian.org]

-- 
<https://www.alejandro-colomar.es>

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