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

Xavier shiningxc at gmail.com
Mon Feb 16 12:37:07 EST 2009


On Mon, Feb 16, 2009 at 6:06 PM, Aaron Griffin <aaronmgriffin at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.
>

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.


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