[SM-Discuss] man-db (Was: Anyone interested in a mlocate spell?)

Eric Sandall eric at sandall.us
Sun Oct 26 18:15:16 EDT 2008


On Thu, 23 Oct 2008 15:09:03 -0500 (CDT)
Kevin Monceaux <Kevin at RawFedDogs.net> wrote:

> 
> On Thu, 23 Oct 2008, Kevin Monceaux wrote:
> 
> > I know the whatis updates on Debian were very fast.  It's package
> > system automatically fired off a trigger whenever a package
> > installed or updated man pages that performed a whatis update.  The
> > updates too a few seconds at most to run.
> 
> It looks like a full makewhatis run versus a mandb run isn't that
> much of a savings.  A full makewhatis run on my box just took all of
> 23 seconds. But, I only have 351 packages on my box.  Someone with a
> fully loaded Source Mage box might see a larger savings.

# time makewhatis

real    1m2.352s
user    0m16.310s
sys     0m1.655s

$ gaze installed|wc -l
700

On a similar note, packages which install man pages should probably run
makewhatis in FINAL to keep the database updated. To save time, it can
be called with the path to the directory man pages were installed in to
be updated.

e.g.
for mandir in $(grep "/usr/share/man" $INSTALL_LOG/$SPELL-$VERSION)
do
  makewhatis  $INSTALL_ROOT/$mandir
done

Not perfect, could use refinement, but that's the general idea.

-sandalle

-- 
Eric Sandall                     |  Source Mage GNU/Linux Developer
eric at sandall.us PGP: 0xA8EFDD61  |  http://www.sourcemage.org/
http://eric.sandall.us/          |  http://counter.li.org/  #196285
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