On Fri, Aug 19, 2022 at 11:55:25PM +0100, Luca Boccassi wrote: > On Fri, 19 Aug 2022 at 23:43, Colin Watson <cjwat...@debian.org> wrote: > > I just had my attention drawn to this bug because a man-db upload > > unexpectedly (to me) gained a dependency on systemd | systemd-tmpfiles, > > thus adding to the build-essential set. /usr/lib/tmpfiles.d/man-db.conf > > reads: > > > > d /var/cache/man 0755 man man 1w > > > > This line exists only for cleanup purposes; the directory is also > > shipped in the package with matching ownership and permissions, so > > man-db clearly doesn't rely on tmpfiles for creating that directory. > > Shipping files in /var in a package is a bug though, and it really > needs to be fixed. So it sounds like in this case a dependency is > indeed the right thing, given presence of the directory in /var is > necessary?
No. The actual FHS requirement is that the application must be able to recover from deletion of files under /var/cache. The only part of the package that I consider to be truly critical is man(1) itself, and that continues to work just fine for most purposes even when /var/cache/man has been entirely removed. While mandb(8) will fail, that isn't fatal to the operation of the package; it will merely be somewhat degraded. Even if this weren't the case and I felt that this was an important problem to solve, I'd probably choose some other way to solve it. -- Colin Watson (he/him) [cjwat...@debian.org]
