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

[Allan McRae]

Aaron Griffin wrote:
> 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 :)
>   

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