On Fri, Dec 5, 2025 at 2:20 PM Dave Cantrell <[email protected]> wrote: > > 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.
It is tempting, but the usage of Linux on really constrained systems (such as single board computers) are still extremely common, so I think there's still value in compression. And it is also becoming more common to make larger and wordier man pages, rather than splitting them into separate help tooling. The compression helps a little bit with that. I think it's definitely valuable for info pages, which are often huge. (As an aside, I *barely* remember the time when we preformatted man pages, that was already going away by the time I started to use Linux...) -- 真実はいつも一つ！/ Always, there's only one truth! -- _______________________________________________ devel mailing list -- [email protected] To unsubscribe send an email to [email protected] Fedora Code of Conduct: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/project/code-of-conduct/ List Guidelines: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines List Archives: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/[email protected] Do not reply to spam, report it: https://pagure.io/fedora-infrastructure/new_issue
