Bug#94995: PROPOSAL] Clarifying instructions on linking man pages
On Monday 23 April 2001 5:11 pm, Colin Watson wrote:
> Package: debian-policy
> Version: 3.5.3.0
> Severity: wishlist
>
[big snip, you already know what it says]
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? 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.
clothcat:/etc/cron.weekly# diff -h man-db man-db.proposed
8c8
< /usr/bin/nice /usr/bin/mandb 2>/dev/null >/dev/null
---
> /usr/bin/nice /usr/bin/mandb -c 2>/dev/null >/dev/null
clothcat:/etc/cron.weekly#
or make that a cron.monthly and leave the weekly as is? (this is
preferable especially if there is a significant difference in resources
used for either method)
Just a thought.
--
Stephen Stafford
GPG public key on request
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