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. Something like USE=noman would be nicer for users, but IIRC we have a policy against them (flags with a "no" prefix). Setting a global USE="+man" default also creates some headaches in our "user interface." OTOH I do agree it would be nice if we had a way to disable them if you very explicitly ask for it. Sphinx (the example in bug 890589) is obnoxious, and if you're going to strip the man pages with something like FEATURES=noman on an embedded system -- or if you just don't care about those particular man pages -- then it would be great if you could not build them in the first place. The best of both worlds would be if someone could convince upstream to generate them during their "make dist" process.
