On Thu, Jan 19, 2023 at 11:33:20AM -0500, Michael Orlitzky wrote: > On Thu, 2023-01-19 at 13:25 +0200, Cedric Sodhi wrote: > > In this case, the expectation to compile manpages does not come free > > of cost and protects noone. By the above formulation, the cost > > "should" not come in the form of additional (heavy! dev-python/sphinx > > and deps are 75M) dependencies, but instead in the form of additional > > work for the maintainer. One way to annoy less-enthusiastic (proxy-) > > maintainers, in my opinion. > > I think "protects noone" is overstating it. If your network is broken, > the man pages might be your only troubleshooting resource. It would > suck to find that (say) net-wireless/iwd introduced a new USE=man flag > a few weeks ago and now you can't get connected to some weird > conference wifi and are unable to google for help.
Fair enough, "protects noone" was not perfectly correct. But is the improbable combination of P( the user should have been protected ) = P( user accidentally/mistakenly specifies USE=-man ) × P( the manpage's availability circularly depends on itself ) × P( the user has no other access to the manpage ) × P( the maintainer did not recognize the sitation and disabled "man" ) × P( the user ends up in that situation ) × P( the user is a reasonable user who deserves to be protected (!) ) really worth generalizing it as a "ALL packages MUST NEVER … ! "? I think a far more agreeable approach which does justice to The likelihood of the case that forcing manpages actually saves someone AND The likelihood of the case that it causes problems (by dependencies for the user, or by additional work for the maintainer) is to remind maintainers of it, but live-and-let-live, i.e. let maintainers do their job without imposing a policy. I wouldn't know of anyone who would have had a problem with this in the past and I don't think anyone will exclaim "Gosh, if just we have had a policy...!" in the future.
