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From: Aisha Tammy <openbsd@aisha.cc>
To: Ingo Schwarze <schwarze@usta.de>
Cc: discuss@mandoc.bsd.lv
Subject: Re: Possible to add optional bzip2 support?
Date: Sun, 29 Nov 2020 16:41:45 -0500	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <8f73d02e-6a2a-0549-a578-091ce7cedb48@aisha.cc> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <20201129201424.GI58187@athene.usta.de>




On 11/29/20 3:14 PM, Ingo Schwarze wrote:
> Hi Aisha,
> 
> Aisha Tammy wrote on Sun, Nov 29, 2020 at 10:37:44AM -0500:
> 
>> I'm trying to get Gentoo to add mandoc as an alternative man provider
>> as an optional replacement for the current man-db. Currently, we only allow
>> man-db as the man provider. I've successfully managed to get the changes
>> and have already made the PR (hopefully, barring anything extra ordinary, it
>> should go through).
> 
> Nice, thanks.
> 
>> Currently, we compress all our man pages with bzip2 by default
> 
> Why?
> 
> Compressing manual pages makes absolutely no sense to me in 2020.
> 
> This is on one of my desktop machines where i have large amounts of
> cruft installed for testing:
> 
>    $ du -sh /usr/share/man /usr/X11R6/man /usr/local/man 
>   41.8M   /usr/share/man
>   9.0M    /usr/X11R6/man
>   69.9M   /usr/local/man
> 
> Here are a few other directories for comparison:
> 
>   88.3M   /usr/local/share/emacs
>   71.2M   /usr/local/share/gtk-doc
>   209M    /usr/local/share/doc
>   273M    /usr/local/share/locale
>   209M    /usr/local/lib/firefox
>   218M    /usr/local/lib/thunderbird
>   609M    /usr/local/lib/libreoffice
> 
> So all the manual pages on a system, even if they are uncompressed
> and even if a lot of stuff is installed, typically need a small
> fraction of the space needed by a single modern application program.
> 
> Asked the other way around, who cares, in 2020, about 0.05 GB of disk
> space on the /usr/ partition?  Or even, when installing insane amounts
> of optional software, about maybe 0.2 or so GB?
> 
> How are such totally negligible gains worth any kind of trouble?
> 
> Sometimes, people told me "but we want to install unchanged on
> embedded systems and there 50 MB are a big deal".  I have a hard
> time believing that.  If a given embedded system really has trouble
> with disk space for 50 MB of manual pages, then it is virtually
> certain that you cannot install a modern general-purpose operating
> system to it without changes in the first place.  And it almost
> certainly isn't a system where users want to log in interactively
> and read manual pages.

HAHA!! This is exactly what I expected, down to the T :D
And I am not saying this maliciously AT ALL, this is what I 
my feelings were, albeit on the fence.
Just wanted to ask in the off chance that somehow, magically, this
was a sane option (its not) :P

> 
>> and none of them are usable with mandoc, a small amount of scripting
>> is needed to recompress all man pages and this also messes up the
>> package manager and over all is a bit ugly.  I am unsure how bad/hard
>> it is to add bzip2 support but is there any hope of it being
>> added as an option? even if it is not available by default?
> 
> It would be easier to convince me to delete *.gz support than to
> add *.bz2 support.  Either is unrelated to the purpose of mandoc
> and linking to zlib is ugly and messy, i'd love to get rid of the
> dependency and of the rather ugly and error-prone code needed to
> support *.gz files.
> 
> Regarding *.bz2 in particular, i see very little chance to get
> /usr/lib/libbz2.so.*.* added to the OpenBSD base system.
> 
> Regarding options, i think options are evil in general.  If you
> want an option, you need very good arguments why the feature is
> useful to such an ususual degree that it justifies an option.
> Here, i don't see any benefit at all to offset the cost in
> dependencies, complexity, and maintenance.
> 

These are all perfectly valid reasons and I agree.
I agree with not needing this and am totally fine without it :)

Thanks a lot!
Aisha

PS: Would it be possible to get a minor(or whatever) release to address the
bug fixes (iirc html fixes were some) and building with gcc-10 ?

> Yours,
>   Ingo
> 
--
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  parent reply	other threads:[~2020-11-29 21:41 UTC|newest]

Thread overview: 4+ messages / expand[flat|nested]  mbox.gz  Atom feed  top
     [not found] <d5e55c57-002a-e654-b7c2-dca9fb84863d@aisha.cc>
2020-11-29 20:14 ` Ingo Schwarze
2020-11-29 21:07   ` Jan Stary
2020-11-29 21:41   ` Aisha Tammy [this message]
2020-11-29 22:24   ` Kazuo Kuroi

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