Subject: [bug#75501] [PATCH] gnu: mandoc: Support zstd-compressed man pages.

From: Sören Tempel <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 16 Jan 2025 21:53:32 +0100

Hello Maxim,

thank you for having a look at the patch and your fast feedback!

Maxim Cournoyer <[email-masked]> wrote:
> While moving things around, I'd use a plain list for the arguments, and
> format the phases under the #:phases argument (newline), to satisfy our
> max 80 columns of width convention.

Changed accordingly in the v2 that I just send.

> Interesting solution!  The issue should be ideally be brought upstream
> though, and referenced here.  With the leading implementation man-db
> having gained zstd support, others should follow suite.  They may be
> interested in using your solution, or otherwise adding "native" support
> for it.
> 
> Could you please create such an issue with them, cross-reference it in
> your patch, and send a v2?

Having worked with upstream mandoc before, I doubt that they would be
interested in implementing additional compression schemes. mandoc is an
OpenBSD project, and OpenBSD doesn't compress its man pages. Usually,
its hard to convince them to add features that do not benefit OpenBSD.

Specifically, regarding compression there is a prior thread on adding
bzip2 where the mandoc maintainer states “compressing manual pages
makes absolutely no sense to me […]”:

	https://inbox.vuxu.org/mandoc-discuss/[email-masked]/

The Guix patch is very small so that I don't see any issue with
maintaining it downstream for the foreseeable future. Nonetheless, I
added a link to the aforementioned thread to the patch description.

If it is a requirement, I can create another “compression support”
thread on their ML but I would prefer to use my time elsewhere.

Greetings
Sören