Bug#94995: PROPOSAL] Clarifying instructions on linking man pages

[Colin Watson <cjw44@flatline.org.uk>]

On Mon, 23 Apr 2001 at 23:28:52 +0100, Stephen Stafford wrote:
> Today I got sick of waiting for man to search for some pages, it has 
> been getting steadily slower for weeks now.  I suspect my man database 
> had become at least semi-corrupt, I have been running man on lots of 
> local files recently, maybe this has some bearing?

I doubt it; man -l shouldn't touch the database.

> A quick scan through the manpage for mandb showed up a -c option to
> totally recreate the database from scratch. Just running 'mandb -c'
> has significantly speeded man up for me.
> 
> semi-proposal (call it wishlist if you like):
> the current update in cron.weekly of the database seems to only clear 
> out dangling symlinks and warn about bad groff, from what I have 
> observed (although I have no concrete proof of this) recreating the 
> database from scratch offers significant improvement in at least some 
> cases (like when the database becomes slightly corrupt,) and shouldn't 
> do any harm in any case I can think of.

See bug #39842. I'm not sure I can please everybody here. In an upcoming
upload I'm going to start versioning the database again (the code is
there, it just hasn't been consistently applied), which should
significantly improve matters. For anything else, the database becoming
corrupt is just plain a bug - please report it if you can track it down
(--debug output is useful, as is the output of /usr/sbin/accessdb).
mandb --create shouldn't be necessary in a robust system, and I'd rather
find any bugs that there are rather than hiding them on a weekly basis.

I should also point out that not having to have man do database updates
so much, as in this proposal, will also decrease the likelihood of
database corruption, and mean that you should never have to wait for man
in the first place. :)

-- 
Colin Watson                                     [cjw44@flatline.org.uk]