At 2025-12-25T11:06:34-0800, Russ Allbery wrote: > > Yup, I'd like that policy to change. I've added debian-policy@ to > > this mail (and also linux-man@). > > 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. I'd add that, in contrast to the mid-1990s when Debian's man page compression policy was promulgated--my recollection is that it was an early, early decision, already in place when I started using Debian in January 1996--transparent compression is now an oft-implemented feature of file systems, including some that are popular in embedded systems, such as JFFS2, where it's been the case for at least 19 years.[1] Further, the selection of compression algorithm and container format has become a popular site for partisan battles over the same.[2][3][4][5][6] Since Debian already generates sufficient partisan battles over issues specific to our practices, it might be advantageous to abandon this one. (Speaking for myself, I find deflate/gzip satisfactory, and I intend to release groff 1.24.0 as a gzipped tape archive.) Adopting this change would enable man-db man(1) to discard the zsoelim(1) tool, simplifying the code base and logic depending on this tool--but I defer to Colin's judgment of how advantageous that'd be. Regards, Branden [1] https://lwn.net/Articles/219827/ [2] https://linuxreviews.org/Comparison_of_Compression_Algorithms [3] https://www.nongnu.org/lzip/xz_inadequate.html [4] https://engineering.fb.com/2016/08/31/core-infra/smaller-and-faster-data-compression-with-zstandard/ [5] https://www.reddit.com/r/archlinux/comments/eiia99/zst_packages_consistently_larger_than_xz/ [6] https://sysdfree.wordpress.com/2020/01/04/293/
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