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

[Michael Stapelberg]

Thanks for the heads-up. A reduction to 2250 is a great improvement indeed!
Once this is uploaded and processed, I can update the bug (mostly for
completeness) with new disk usage numbers from manpages.d.o.

On Tue, Jul 4, 2017 at 5:12 AM, Sébastien Villemot <sebastien at debian.org>
wrote:

> 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
>   `-      GPG Key: 4096R/381A7594
>



-- 
Best regards,
Michael
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