I have a simple base image for containers which contains just core shared libraries, SSL libraries and certificates. This image is about 30MB, of which 10MB is library manpages. It seems to me that library manpages are mainly a resource for developers and should be packaged with the other compile-time files such as include files and static libraries. I suggest that manpages for libraries should move to the -dev package unless MK_MANSPLITPKG is set.
sounds good to me!
(In reply to dfr from comment #0) Maybe we should just set MANSPLITPKG by default (or even remove the option and always generate -man package).
do we have a dependency level like, 'suggests' or 'recommends' like deb has?
An example of space savings: localhost/freebsd15-minimal latest-aarch64 175687352406 11 hours ago 78.1 MB localhost/freebsd15-minimal latest-amd64 21c251e45183 11 hours ago 57 MB Not quite like-for-like but the aarch64 image was built with manpages contained in the regular library packages and the amd64 one was after splitting them out to the -dev package.
Created attachment 244839 [details] Add dev tags to library manpages unless MANSPLITPKG is enabled
that looks plausible.
Why not just enabling MANSPLITPKG as I suggested ?
Mostly because I already had this mostly written before you suggested that. I still think it might be worth opening up a discussion about splitting out manpages by default on pkgbase@ though. If we enable MANSPLITPKG by default, should we merge that to stable/14 and stable/13? If not, this patch would still help to reduce image sizes for those branches.
We could merge it back anywhere, pkgbase is still supposed to be beta :)
I opened https://reviews.freebsd.org/D41861 to flip the MANSPLITPKG switch.