[gentoo-dev] QA PG 0305 (manpages must always be installed) discussion

[Cedric Sodhi]

I would like to continue https://bugs.gentoo.org/890589 here and also increase the audience. The original policy was voted upon by 6 seniors and approved with no documented opposition or discussion. I think it's possible that it went under the radar a bit. It says:

> Packages must not disable installing manpages via USE flags (e.g. USE=man or USE=doc). If upstream does not ship prebuilt manpages and building them requires additional dependencies, the maintainer should build them and ship along with the package.

https://projects.gentoo.org/qa/policy-guide/installed-files.html#pg0305

While I acknowledge Gentoo's responsibility to steer things towards the better, I am also a vivid defender of freedom-of-choice (part of the reason why I use Gentoo) and am sceptical of "protect the user from their own decisions" kind-of approaches.

In this case, the expectation to compile manpages does not come free of cost and protects noone. By the above formulation, the cost "should" not come in the form of additional (heavy! dev-python/sphinx and deps are 75M) dependencies, but instead in the form of additional work for the maintainer. One way to annoy less-enthusiastic (proxy-) maintainers, in my opinion.

On the other hand - and I pick up the discussion from the tracker here - there is no documented benefit. We actively deny the user a choice which they were supposed to have from Upstream and gain nothing practical from it.

In response to Comment #12, we could keep the spirit of "ensure documentation [if it exists in the first place]" and say "should install manpages", which would at least leave the maintainer the chance for an easy way out, if it comes with dependencies. I'm not a fan of this approach either, because it still denies the user their rightful choice, but at least it wouldn't negatively impact either the maintainer or the user.

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