Re: Getting rid of the mandb profile hook?

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hi,

Ricardo Wurmus <rekado@elephly.net> skribis:

> Ludovic Courtès <ludo@gnu.org> writes:
>
>> I’m thinking we could get rid of the mandb hook.
>
> Yes, please!

I see consensus against that hook.  :-)

>>   1. Provide a ‘man’ wrapper or modify the ‘man-db’ package such that
>>      the database gets built on the first use of ‘man -k’, unless it’s
>>      already up-to-date.
>>
>>   2. Add a phase in gnu-build-system.scm that creates a per-package
>>      database.  Change the mandb profile hook such that all it needs to
>>      do is “concatenate” all these GDBM databases (which should be much
>>      faster than browsing all the man pages as it currently does).
>
> Either of these seem fine to me.  I think option 2 would be nicer as we
> don’t need to modify “man” and most of the work is done ahead of time.
> I don’t know if these individual mandb database *can* simply be
> concatenated.  If this turns out to be much more complicated I think we
> should just go with option 1.

It’s “concatenated” in the sense of building the union of all the
key/value entries.  So it’s not for free either but certainly much less
expensive than what we’re doing.

I’ll probably take a look at some point, but if another person tired of
waiting for the hook would like to give it a try, please do!  :-)

Ludo’.