Re: Accessibility of man pages (was: Playground pager lsp(1))

[Alexis]

Alejandro Colomar <alx.manpages@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.