On Fri, Mar 30, 2012 at 04:59:40PM +0100, Colin Watson wrote: > On Thu, Mar 29, 2012 at 06:23:44PM -0700, Josh Triplett wrote: > > man-db has had dpkg triggers for almost four years. These triggers make > > the cron jobs entirely redundant. Please consider removing these cron > > jobs. > > My main concern here is that I have no idea how many people are relying > on apropos output for locally-installed (i.e. non-packaged) manual > pages; removing the cron jobs would break that unless people knew to run > mandb by hand. I rather suspect that the probability of that is higher > outside the population of Debian developers ...
Personally, I don't know of any people relying on apropos output at all, but that doesn't mean people don't use it. (I more frequently tend to find myself using zgrep over the entire contents of all manpages, rather than just doing a keyword search over a subset of those contents.) I'd personally prefer to just turn it off entirely, much like the locate database. (How crazy would you consider it to split the apropos functionality into a separate package, much like locate split off of findutils?) However, the need to run mandb for new manpages in /usr/local seems no different than the need to run ldconfig for new libraries in /usr/local (other than the severity of what happens if you don't). I think you could reasonably convey that via NEWS.Debian.gz. One other thought: what if you made mandb record the stat of the directories in the manpath, and then had any tools relying on the mandb check that stat and warn if mandb needs to run again? - Josh Triplett -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-bugs-dist-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
