[arch-dev-public] state and maintainership of man(-db)/man-pages
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
On Mon, Feb 16, 2009 at 10:52 AM, Andreas Radke <a.radke@arcor.de> wrote:
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.
On Mon, Feb 16, 2009 at 6:06 PM, Aaron Griffin <aaronmgriffin@gmail.com> wrote:
On Mon, Feb 16, 2009 at 10:52 AM, Andreas Radke <a.radke@arcor.de> wrote:
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.
On Mon, Feb 16, 2009 at 11:37 AM, Xavier <shiningxc@gmail.com> wrote:
On Mon, Feb 16, 2009 at 6:06 PM, Aaron Griffin <aaronmgriffin@gmail.com> wrote:
On Mon, Feb 16, 2009 at 10:52 AM, Andreas Radke <a.radke@arcor.de> wrote:
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 :)
Aaron Griffin wrote:
On Mon, Feb 16, 2009 at 11:37 AM, Xavier <shiningxc@gmail.com> wrote:
On Mon, Feb 16, 2009 at 6:06 PM, Aaron Griffin <aaronmgriffin@gmail.com> wrote:
On Mon, Feb 16, 2009 at 10:52 AM, Andreas Radke <a.radke@arcor.de> wrote:
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 :)
The way I see it, pacman hooks will solve all of life's problems. See http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/User:Allan/Pacman_Hooks if you want to comment on their implementation. Allan
On Mon, Feb 16, 2009 at 10:52 AM, Andreas Radke <a.radke@arcor.de> wrote:
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.
If you really need someone else too, I can do it. However, I don't think the updates are super high priority, so if the man updates are a little lax I doubt it would be a big deal - I imagine most updates are fixing typos or really small things like that.
participants (4)
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Aaron Griffin
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Allan McRae
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Andreas Radke
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Xavier