Subject: Bug#4137: libpaper contains compressed manpage, or policy should change

From: Ian Jackson <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 14 Aug 96 03:37 BST

Package: libpaper
Version: 1.0-1

The package contains:
-r--r--r-- root/root       718 Aug 13 18:04 1996 usr/man/man1/paper.1.gz

1. This file should be writeable by root (see the guidelines).

2. Either it should not be compressed (see the guidelines) or we
should mandate compressed manpages.

Ian.

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From: [email-masked]
Date: Wed, 14 Aug 96 08:19 EDT

Ian> 2. Either it should not be compressed (see the guidelines) or we
  Ian> should mandate compressed manpages.

In this case the guidelines are of. Bruce waved his hand a while ago and
allowed parallel existence of compressed and uncompressed manpages. 
Some maintainers, yours truly included, started to compress man pages:

edd@miles:~> find /usr/man/ -name \*gz |wc -l
    107  

In this case, the Guidelines need updating.

--
Dirk Eddelb"uttel                             http://qed.econ.queensu.ca/~edd

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From: Yves Arrouye <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 20 Aug 1996 23:33:14 +0200 (MET DST)

> should mandate compressed manpages.

I remember that a long time ago it was said that it was okay to gzip
manual pages because the manual reader did handle them nicely? If not,
I vote for having gzipped manual pages. The problem if it is not specified
clearly is that one cannot just gzip -9f /usr/man/man?/* because then
when packages are removed the original manual pages are not found and the 
gzipped ones not removed; and it would be foolish to make dpkg handle that
special case. If nobody objects, can we have gzipped (not compressed)
manual pages by default?

In the meantime, should I not compress the manual pages?

Yves.

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From: Lars Wirzenius <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 21 Aug 1996 15:34:08 +0300

Yves Arrouye:
> manual pages because the manual reader did handle them nicely? 

Our man seems to handle them OK. Since there can be tens of megabytes of
manual pages (I have 18 MB), I think compressing them would be a good idea.

-- 
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---

From: [email-masked]
Date: Wed, 21 Aug 96 15:32 EDT

Yves> I remember that a long time ago it was said that it was okay to gzip
  Yves> manual pages because the manual reader did handle them nicely?

  Lars>  Our man seems to handle them OK. Since there can be tens of
  Lars> megabytes of manual pages (I have 18 MB), I think compressing them
  Lars> would be a good idea.

We already compress them. I seem to have 108 compressed man pages, coming
from 14 of the 210 packages I have installed.

Could this be added to the guidelines as either a policy, or at least an
option? 

edd@miles:~> find /usr/man -name \*.gz | wc -l
    108    

edd@miles:~> grep -l -e "/usr/man.*gz" /var/lib/dpkg/info/*list | wc -l
     14    

edd@miles:~> ls -1 /var/lib/dpkg/info/*list | wc -l
    210