Bug#852166: Contains a large number of auto-generated stub manpages

Sébastien Villemot sebastien at debian.org
Tue Jul 4 12:12:47 UTC 2017


Dear Michael,

Le dimanche 22 janvier 2017 à 09:56 +0100, Michael Stapelberg a écrit :
> Package: liblapack-doc-man
> Version: 3.7.0-1
> Severity: normal
> 
> liblapack-doc-man installs 10770 files into /usr/share/man/man3, all of which 
> seem to be generated by Doxygen if I understand correctly.
> 
> Of these 10770 files, 5902 are symlinks and 4868 are regular files.
> Of the 4868 regular files:
> • 2057 files consist of 19 lines (documenting a function)
> • 2550 files consist of 25 lines (documenting a file)
> 
> Notably, these files do not contain anything but the function prototype.
> 
> 261 files with actual content worth looking at remain.
> 
> The large number of files without substantial content is unfortunate for a few 
> different reasons:
> 
> • On manpages.debian.org, liblapack-doc-man consumes 1GB of disk space per 
>   Debian version. The next biggest consumer is linux-manual-4.8 with 51 MB.
> 
> • liblapack-doc-man consumes about 10000 inodes on user’s root file systems for 
>   no good reason. Even when plenty of inodes are available, remember that many 
>   backup programs do not scale well when presented with a large number of tiny 
>   files.
>   
> • I haven’t verified it, but I assume that the man database and similar tools 
>   will degrade in performance when presented with such a large corpus of 
>   manpages.
>   
> Could you change the package so that it only contains the 261 files with actual
> content please? Thank you!

I am about to upload a new version that drastically reduces the number
of manpage files to about 2250: this includes the ~250 files that you
mentioned, plus about 2000 symlinks. Note that those symlinks serve a
purpose: they correspond to the functions in the API of lapack, so that
one can do "man funcname" on all of them (several functions are
documented by the same manpage, hence the need for symlinks).

I think this is a reasonable compromise, and I hope this is ok with you
(but feel free to tell me if this is not).

Cheers,

-- 
 .''`.    Sébastien Villemot
: :' :    Debian Developer
`. `'     http://sebastien.villemot.name
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