On Fri, Mar 30, 2012 at 10:29:05AM -0700, Josh Triplett wrote: > On Fri, Mar 30, 2012 at 04:59:40PM +0100, Colin Watson wrote: > > 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 see it used quite a bit, and not just by me. :-) > (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.) Nowadays there's 'man -K' too for that, although that doesn't rely on the database. It should be very significantly faster than zgrep. > 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?) Well, I think this gets to the heart of the matter: is your root problem mainly that mandb is slow? If so, I have microbenchmarks that strongly indicate that the slowness isn't intrinsic, and if I ever manage to put enough spare hours in a row I intend to fix that. It really shouldn't need to take more than maybe a few seconds even on not terribly exciting hardware, and certainly nowhere near as much as locate. See #630799. My basic concern here is that splitting packages is forever, or very nearly, and so I'm reluctant to do so to work around fixable performance problems. > 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. It's better for software to just work rather than to require documentation explaining how to make it work, though. > 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? That might be workable, I guess, although I worry that it would be annoying for users without administrative privileges. (apropos used to attempt to raise privileges and update the database automatically; that was a disaster area and removing it was a big improvement.) Cheers, -- Colin Watson [cjwat...@debian.org] -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-bugs-dist-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
