On Wed, Oct 17, 2018 at 11:51:29AM +0200, Sven Joachim wrote: > On 2018-10-14 20:15 +0200, Antonio wrote: > > why does mandb take about 1-2 minutes, each time, when invoked during > > apt-get dist-upgrade? > > I don't think it actually takes that long each time, only when the > database format changes and the whole database needs to be rebuilt from > scratch. This happened twice this year where libgdbm changed its soname > and man -db was rebuilt against the new version.
Also #630799 / #696503. (I still hope to finish that work one day.) > >From the NEWS file: > > ,---- > | man-db 2.5.3 (17 November 2008) > | =============================== > | > | * man-db now uses GDBM (--with-db=gdbm) in preference to Berkeley DB > | (--with-db=db or --with-db=dbN where N is 1, 2, 3, or 4) by > | default, since hardware improvements have rendered Berkeley DB's > | speed advantages negligible for our purposes and the relatively > | frequent SONAME and on-disk format changes are not worth the > | hassle. Distributors should note that if they follow this change > | then they will need to arrange for databases to be rebuilt on > | upgrade to this version. > `---- > > Ironically, these days the situation is reversed: GDBM changes SONAME > and database format rather frequently, while it looks Berkeley DB will > be stuck at 5.3 forever after Oracle changed its license to AGPL-3 in > version 6.0. Over the total lifetime I'm still content with this decision. :-) -- Colin Watson [[email protected]]
