On 11/28/25 13:07, Neal Gompa wrote:
> Hey folks,
>
> This has been percolating in my mind for a little while now, but we've
> been going through and switching things to zstd across the board (most
> recently initramfs, but we did btrfs compression, zram, and even rpm
> previously), and I wonder if we want to also switch man and info pages
> from gzip to zstd.
>
> This has already been done at least once with OpenMandriva, so I know
> it is possible with an RPM distribution in a reasonable fashion.
>
> At least man-db has support for zstd compression and just needs to be
> told to prefer it at build time, and OpenMandriva has a patch for
> texinfo[1]. If we want to do it, it's not hard to accomplish
>
> Is there a compelling reason that we shouldn't consider migrating to
> zstd in an upcoming Fedora release?
>
>
> [1]:
> https://github.com/OpenMandrivaAssociation/texinfo/blob/master/texinfo-6.7-zstd-compression.patch
>
>
I personally do not see the point in compressed man pages anymore. A long time
ago we would preformat man pages too since doing that was resource intensive
and even Linux systems had both man pages and catman pages. But we don't need
any of that these days.
I would rather us do away with compressed man pages entirely. What would be
really nice if we had an option on rpm (and by extension dnf) to say "install
this package, but I don't want any man pages from it". Perhaps even a
site-wide option in dnf.conf too. They wouldn't land on the installed system,
the rpmdb would be fine, and it could be maintained through package upgrades.
You could even go further and add an option to dnf that says "on second
thought, I do want man pages....(for everything|but just for <this package>)".
Doing that would also avoid having to create yet-more-packages, like man page
subpackages. The advantages I see here are that you can have all the man pages
you want, but we would introduce easy tooling that would allow you to "opt out"
of man pages when setting up a system. Lean images, and so on. Shave the yak,
but just in a slightly different way. But that's just me.
How would rpm know what to do? Well we could come up with a marker for man
pages (and info pages) using rpmfileAttrs. Like rpm has RPMFILE_DOC now and
RPMFILE_README and RPMFILE_LICENSE. Though I brought that up years ago and it
was rejected. Could use libmagic. Or we could more broadly say "anything
installed in %{_mandir} is a man page" and so on. Point is, there are a number
of ways to implement this in the package tooling without having to create more
packages and or bigger spec files and I think it would be a nice way to both
keep man pages but allow for building systems without the extra baggage when
you want something extra lean.
(Also applies to info pages!)
*HYPOTHETICAL* command ideas:
dnf install --no-man-pages coreutils tmux sl
dnf install --no-man-pages --no-info-pages gcc make
dnf upgrade --no-man-pages coreutils
dnf upgrade --man-pages gcc
You get the idea.
--
Dave Cantrell <[email protected]>
Red Hat, Inc. | Boston, MA | EST5EDT
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