Alejandro Colomar <alx.manpa...@gmail.com> writes:
Colin, I've had a feeling for a long time that compressed pages
are
not very useful. These days, storage is cheap. How would you
feel
about having the man pages installed uncompressed in Debian?
That
would allow running text tools directly in /usr/share/man/.
I've had
to do that several times, and lucky me that I have the source
code of
the Linux man-pages checked out in my computers, but other users
don't
and they might have trouble finding for example which pages talk
about
RLIMIT_NOFILE. The only way I know of is:
$ grep -rl RLIMIT_NOFILE man*
man2/dup.2
man2/pidfd_getfd.2
man2/open.2
man2/fcntl.2
man2/poll.2
man2/pidfd_open.2
man2/getrlimit.2
man2/select.2
man2/seccomp_unotify.2
man3/getdtablesize.3
man3/mq_open.3
man3/errno.3
man3/sysconf.3
man5/proc.5
man7/unix.7
man7/fanotify.7
man7/capabilities.7
I'd like to enable this ability for everyone by not compressing
system man pages. I guess we should talk to the Debian policy
mailing list?
As a related data point, i'd like to mention Gentoo's position on
this, i.e. that man pages will continue to be bzip2-compressed by
default:
"app-text/mandoc bzip2 support"
https://bugs.gentoo.org/854267
"Remove /usr/share/man from default inclusion list for docompress"
https://bugs.gentoo.org/836367
Alexis.
