Re: Stop compressing manual pages

Alejandro Colomar <[email protected]> Sun, 19 Apr 2026 08:51:03 +0200

Newsgroups	gmane.linux.man,gmane.linux.debian.devel.policy
Message-ID	<aeR7MzmSQHRHLK2q@devuan>

Hi Colin,

On 2025-12-25T11:06:34-0800, Russ Allbery wrote:
> Alejandro Colomar <[email protected]> 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 ([email protected])              <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>

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

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