On 10/15/2014 05:36 PM, Ondrej Vasik wrote:
On Wed, 2014-10-15 at 18:01 +0200, Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek wrote:
On Wed, Oct 15, 2014 at 05:12:07PM +0200, Peter Schiffer wrote:
On 10/15/2014 04:47 PM, Chris Adams wrote:
Once upon a time, Jan Chaloupka <jchaloup@redhat.com> said:
there has been a discussion about if we need cache for man-db for users
which use man pages or update system only from time to time and thus
don't need to update cache every day. man-db as it is now depends on
systemd which brings another set of packages. The use case is "I just
want to read man page. So I install man which on the other hand download
another set of packages. I want to read man page and it downloads systemd.".
On the majority of systems these days, is it really an issue to cache
man pages anymore?  I mean, back when a long man page (thinking about
some of the perl documentation for example) could take a while to
render, it mattered.  Now however, systems are much much faster, and we
expect GUI web browsers to render vastly more complicated content in a
fraction of a second.

Maybe the time has come to just stop caching man pages at all, or at
least make that functionality optional (and non-default)?

Hello,

I would add some noteworthy information:

 * the man-db cron/timer script is taking care of man DB containing
only the man page title and short description i.e., the first NAME
section of the man page. This DB is speeding up the searching in
mentioned section with the man -k command. It is not used for
displaying man pages or doing the full text search with man -K command
and it is not required for normal usage of man command (man -k should
also work without this DB).

 * Debian is updating this DB via deb hooks (or how it is called)
during package installation/update and via daily cron script for man
pages installed outside of package manager.

 * updating this DB is usually pretty quick, but creation can take some
time..

 * man pages cache, pre-formatted man pages stored on disk in plain
text, called cat pages in man-db context, is not used in Fedora.
I don't think that adding an additional subpackage to be manually
installed is worth the trouble. We should be making things simpler for
administrators, not require more manual involvement. From Peters'
description it seems it would be fine to simply ignore the timer and
not have the cache if systemd is not running for whatever reason. So
it would seem that ommitting systemd from the dependency list is the
answer. But omitting systemd from the dependency list is not possible,
because the dependency is necessary to order man-db after systemd in
case of a normal installation of both in one transaction. After things
calm down with F21, I'll return to the idea of splitting out
systemd-filesystem (name subject to change) to allow packages which
Or we may even move unitdir into the basic filesystem package - if the
unitdir is the only requirement - which is probably the case for most of
the daemons. It would probably be better than systemd-filesystem
subpackage.

Ondrej

<sigh>

I discussed this with
Peter Schiffer and the end result was in the future the man-db cron should be removed and man-db database should be updated with rpm trigger and the cron job should be kept as is until then, presicecly to prevent this from happening ( systemd being pulled in when it should not or component magically expecting it to be there )  and correct dependency on coreOS/baseOS components would be kept.

Just make FESCO/FPC clean this up it was them who decided not to make it mandatory what should or should not be migrated to timer units and this is precisely the fallout I had expected from not doing that.

Those individuals need to start accepting responsibility for the fallout from their decision making so as I said have them clean it up.

JBG