On Fri, Jan 20, 2023 at 9:13 AM orbea <or...@riseup.net> wrote: > > Protecting users from themselves can be a misfeature. Its better to > educate and then let them freely choose than to play as their nanny. >
TL;DR - it makes sense to unconditionally install prebuilt manpages, but not to require pulling in dependencies to build them. The latter should be up to maintainer discretion. I suspect the original policy was more about the fact that install masks are already available to cover use cases like avoiding manpages. I think the dependency issue is the much bigger one. If the dependencies to generate manpages are trivial or can be expected to be otherwise installed I can see the argument for just installing them anyway. However, when they're large it doesn't make much sense. If you're going to go on an expedition to the middle of the wilderness where you can't use your phone to google a manpage, then I'd think that manpages are probably just one of MANY things you'll be wanting to pack. I get that once upon a time people only owned a single computer and were concerned about having that one computer down. Access to specialized tools could still be something you have to plan for today. However, the text of most manpages is easily searched online today so missing them is at worst an inconvenience unless you literally have no access to a browser on another device. -- Rich
