This is what I got from the upstream man-db maintainer. -------- Forwarded Message -------- From: Colin Watson <cjwatson@debian.org> To: Jan de Groot <jan@jgc.homeip.net> Cc: arch-dev-public@archlinux.org Subject: Re: [arch-dev-public] replace man with man-db? Date: Mon, 22 Dec 2008 18:20:51 +0000 On Mon, Dec 22, 2008 at 07:03:19PM +0100, Jan de Groot wrote:

On Mon, 2008-12-22 at 18:57 +0100, Andreas Radke wrote:

...

What's your opinion? Should we stay with "man" and fix what will be reported or satisfy the replacement request.

I'd like to stay with our man until we can't fix something.

If we want to switch to man-db, note that we have to update the man database after installing a package with manpages.

No, this is completely incorrect. It's no more true for man-db than for man. Both man and man-db maintain a database that's used by whatis and apropos. With man, you update it with makewhatis; with man-db, you update it with mandb. If you don't mind whatis and apropos being out of date until the database is next updated by a cron job or whatever, then it's absolutely fine to leave the database alone. You do *not* need to update man-db's database in order to read manual pages using man. In Debian, I arranged for the database to be updated after package installation once we gained the dpkg triggers mechanism so that this could be done reasonably non-intrusively, but this is a nicety. We got by just fine without doing that for well over a decade, and if it weren't the case that it's now really quite straightforward in Debian to keep the database up to date I'd be entirely happy to carry on the old way.

I'm not comfortable with updating every package in our repository with such a command.

It's entirely reasonable for you to be uncomfortable with that, but there's no reason why this should have the slightest bearing on whether you use man-db or man. Regards,