Re: Removing manpages from libpam-modules to improve multi-arch

[Bálint Réczey <balint@balintreczey.hu>]

Hi,

On 2025. Jan 16., Thu at 8:17, Simon Richter <sjr@debian.org> wrote:

Hi,

On 1/16/25 13:22, Russ Allbery wrote:

> There are various things one can do to try to make the output of a man
> page generator like that more consistent, but they don't fix the problem,
> just reduce its frequency, unless Debian sets up to do a fully
> reproducible build with pinned versions of everything (which I don't think
> we want to do).

Agreed, it's not a complete fix, but I'd expect the frequency of changes
in the output besides the version number to be low enough for this to be
the least-effort solution.

If it means we need to trigger a rebuild of a few packages every few
years, then this thread has already used more time.

I agree. It is very easy to detect file differences between multiarch packages and scheduling binNMUs.

Since the described problem potentially affects all packages shipping man pages with the binaries - which is the best practice - splitting man pages from a single package to solve that particular problem sounds misdirected effort.

Cheers,

Balint

    Simon