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

[Aaron Griffin]

On Mon, Feb 16, 2009 at 10:52 AM, Andreas Radke <a.radke at 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.