System: Testing Hi!
With the migration of man-db 2.8.5-1 into testing about a month ago I get bothered once a day with a lot of useless lines in syslog: > Feb 10 00:00:51 osprey mandb[3543]: Purging old database entries in > /usr/share/man... > Feb 10 00:00:51 osprey mandb[3543]: Processing manual pages under > /usr/share/man... > [...] Only to come to the same result day after day after day: > Feb 10 00:00:51 osprey mandb[3543]: 0 man subdirectories contained newer > manual pages. > Feb 10 00:00:51 osprey mandb[3543]: 0 manual pages were added. > Feb 10 00:00:51 osprey mandb[3543]: 0 stray cats were added. > Feb 10 00:00:51 osprey mandb[3543]: 0 old database entries were purged. > Feb 10 00:00:51 osprey systemd[1]: man-db.service: Succeeded. Thankfully Francois filed a bug earlier: <https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=920628 <https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=920628>> which got fixed upstream: <https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/man-db.git/commit/?id=a4206c27060357cc78219a54349624e0d0675aff <https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/man-db.git/commit/?id=a4206c27060357cc78219a54349624e0d0675aff>> So the messages will go away for me in a couple of days. Problem solved. :-) BUT wait... I was wondering why do we have man-db.timer in the first place? and Why is it activated by default? Manpages in my system changes if I install, remove or update packages. And I think this will be the case for the majority of debian users. Shouldn't it be enough to have package install/remove/update event hooks for updating man-db instead? This renders a daily update job pretty useless in my opinion. Do I miss something obvious? On the other side the man-db packages can come with a default disabled timer for folk who need it f.ex. who install packages without dpkg/apt and so on. What do you think? Tom
