I'm the current maintainer of man and man-pages packages. But this affects also all other packages that install any kind of man-pages: We have serious issues and some errors reported that are related to the man package. The current man package has problems with character encoding: http://bugs.archlinux.org/task/7477 http://bugs.archlinux.org/task/9130 and probably with deeper links: http://www.archlinux.org/pipermail/arch-dev-public/2009-February/010257.html http://www.archlinux.org/pipermail/arch-dev-public/2009-January/010056.html Is there anybody who wants to take over the maintainance for all man related stuff? If not I'll do whatever we are going to decide but with relative low priority. For the encoding: Fedora does a recoding in almost every spec file. We could this this similar with a big afford and everybody would have to take care about it or don't care about it at all. man-db as a man replacement promises to solve this. http://www.archlinux.org/pipermail/arch-dev-public/2008-December/009570.html and http://www.archlinux.org/pipermail/arch-dev-public/2008-December/009581.html 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 ? -Andy