Re: Stop compressing manual pages

On Thu, Dec 25, 2025 at 11:06:34AM -0800, Russ Allbery wrote:
> Alejandro Colomar <[email protected]> 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.  I 
definitely agree that embedded folks ought to be consulted, if they 
aren't already simply excluding manual pages entirely.

-- 
Colin Watson (he/him)                              [[email protected]]