Re: [arch-dev-public] state and maintainership of man(-db)/man-pages

On Mon, Feb 16, 2009 at 11:37 AM, Xavier wrote:

On Mon, Feb 16, 2009 at 6:06 PM, Aaron Griffin wrote:

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On Mon, Feb 16, 2009 at 10:52 AM, Andreas Radke wrote:

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I'm almost for changing to man-db. We would just have to decide how to update the db. How is this currently done for "man"? In pacman? Could this be easily changed/added for man-db? If not what would be the generic proto hook for a post.install call? Has anybody tried the AUR pkg: http://aur.archlinux.org/packages.php?ID=9343 ?

man doesn't maintain a DB. man-db actually can work without the DB too. I *think* we could get away with a drop-in replacement. See comments here: http://bugs.archlinux.org/task/9130

I don't have as much information as I'd like, but right now this seems like a good idea. As Colin stated - Debian got away for quite a while without updating the database. I would suggest we simply add a daily cron job to update the DB. If a user is running cron, then "whatis" and "apropos" work fine. If not, they need to update the db themselves.

Yup, the only thing missing from the AUR man-db package is a cron job equivalent to the man one : http://repos.archlinux.org/viewvc.cgi/man/repos/core-i686/whatis.cron.daily?revision=1&view=markup

Btw, I wonder if updating the info database shouldn't be done the same way, a simple cron job instead of a crappy scriptlet for every single package.

info doesn't work that way. If the dir file is not updated "info foo" won't find foo even if it is installed. So no, that won't work. man, on the otherhand, will find the proper man page. Either way this will be mostly moot once we get some sort of hook-mechanism in pacman to do this for us :)