Am 25.12.25 um 12:20 schrieb Alejandro Colomar:
Hello Helge, Tobias,On Thu, Dec 25, 2025 at 06:07:57AM +0000, Helge Kreutzmann wrote:Hello Tobias, if you look at mansect(1), the example given does not work in Debian. I reported this upstream and got the following reply:The issue is that Debian compresses manual pages. Please consider changing the policy to not compress manual pages. The storage savings are irrelevant in this age.Could you consider this?Thanks! 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.
Hi Helge and Alex,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."And regarding the terminology using the word "should", this is defined in section 1.1 (https://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-scope.html#scope):
"The terms should and should not, and the adjective recommended, denote best practices. Non-conformance with these guidelines will generally be considered a bug, but will not necessarily render a package unsuitable for distribution. These statements correspond to bug severities of important, normal, and minor. They are collectively called Policy recommendations."
So by not compressing the man pages, the Debian package would introduce a bug. Moreover, I'd have to explicitely opt out of automatic compression in the build stage of the package.
All of this is doable, of course. But I'm a bit hesitant with just making the switch, given that the manpages package is certainly the package with the most man pages in the Debian ecosystem -- by a large margin.
So it might be better to discuss the pros and cons in a broader audience, trying to understand why the compression has been chosen initially. Maybe only due to disk space limitations back then, but maybe there are other reasons as well -- which might still be valid today.
Regards, Tobias
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