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 <[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.
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) [[email protected]] -- <https://www.alejandro-colomar.es>
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