I'm the current maintainer of man and man-pages packages. But this
affects also all other packages that install any kind of man-pages:

We have serious issues and some errors reported that are related to
the man package. The current man package has problems with

character encoding:
http://bugs.archlinux.org/task/7477
http://bugs.archlinux.org/task/9130

and probably with deeper links:
http://www.archlinux.org/pipermail/arch-dev-public/2009-February/010257.html
http://www.archlinux.org/pipermail/arch-dev-public/2009-January/010056.html


Is there anybody who wants to take over the maintainance for all man
related stuff? If not I'll do whatever we are going to decide but with
relative low priority.



For the encoding: Fedora does a recoding in almost every spec file. We
could this this similar with a big afford and everybody would have to
take care about it or don't care about it at all. man-db as a man
replacement promises to solve this.
http://www.archlinux.org/pipermail/arch-dev-public/2008-December/009570.html
and
http://www.archlinux.org/pipermail/arch-dev-public/2008-December/009581.html

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 ?

-Andy

On Mon, Feb 16, 2009 at 10:52 AM, Andreas Radke <a.radke@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.

On Mon, Feb 16, 2009 at 10:52 AM, Andreas Radke <a.radke@arcor.de> wrote:
> Is there anybody who wants to take over the maintainance for all man
> related stuff? If not I'll do whatever we are going to decide but with
> relative low priority.

If you really need someone else too, I can do it. However, I don't
think the updates are super high priority, so if the man updates are a
little lax I doubt it would be a big deal - I imagine most updates are
fixing typos or really small things like that.

On Mon, Feb 16, 2009 at 6:06 PM, Aaron Griffin <aaronmgriffin@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Feb 16, 2009 at 10:52 AM, Andreas Radke <a.radke@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.

On Mon, Feb 16, 2009 at 11:37 AM, Xavier <shiningxc@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Feb 16, 2009 at 6:06 PM, Aaron Griffin <aaronmgriffin@gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Mon, Feb 16, 2009 at 10:52 AM, Andreas Radke <a.radke@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

Aaron Griffin wrote:

On Mon, Feb 16, 2009 at 11:37 AM, Xavier <shiningxc@gmail.com> wrote:


On Mon, Feb 16, 2009 at 6:06 PM, Aaron Griffin <aaronmgriffin@gmail.com> wrote:


On Mon, Feb 16, 2009 at 10:52 AM, Andreas Radke <a.radke@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