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On Thu, Jan 19, 2023 at 11:33:20AM -0500, Michael Orlitzky wrote: |
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> On Thu, 2023-01-19 at 13:25 +0200, Cedric Sodhi wrote: |
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> > In this case, the expectation to compile manpages does not come free |
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> > of cost and protects noone. By the above formulation, the cost |
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> > "should" not come in the form of additional (heavy! dev-python/sphinx |
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> > and deps are 75M) dependencies, but instead in the form of additional |
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> > work for the maintainer. One way to annoy less-enthusiastic (proxy-) |
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> > maintainers, in my opinion. |
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> |
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> I think "protects noone" is overstating it. If your network is broken, |
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> the man pages might be your only troubleshooting resource. It would |
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> suck to find that (say) net-wireless/iwd introduced a new USE=man flag |
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> a few weeks ago and now you can't get connected to some weird |
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> conference wifi and are unable to google for help. |
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Fair enough, "protects noone" was not perfectly correct. |
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But is the improbable combination of |
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P( the user should have been protected ) = |
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P( user accidentally/mistakenly specifies USE=-man ) |
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× P( the manpage's availability circularly depends on itself ) |
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× P( the user has no other access to the manpage ) |
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× P( the maintainer did not recognize the sitation and disabled "man" ) |
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× P( the user ends up in that situation ) |
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× P( the user is a reasonable user who deserves to be protected (!) ) |
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really worth generalizing it as a "ALL packages MUST NEVER … ! "? |
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I think a far more agreeable approach which does justice to |
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The likelihood of the case that forcing manpages actually saves someone AND |
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The likelihood of the case that it causes problems (by dependencies for the user, or by additional work for the maintainer) |
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is to remind maintainers of it, but live-and-let-live, i.e. let maintainers do their job without imposing a policy. |
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I wouldn't know of anyone who would have had a problem with this in the past and I don't think anyone will exclaim "Gosh, if just we have had a policy...!" in the future. |
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