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

[Aaron Griffin]

On Mon, Feb 16, 2009 at 11:37 AM, Xavier <shiningxc at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.

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 :)