Ubuntu
man-db package

man-db provides no means for packages to index their manpages

Bug #65782 reported by Kyle H
2
Affects Status Importance Assigned to Milestone
man-db (Debian)
New
Undecided
Unassigned
man-db (Ubuntu)
Confirmed
Wishlist
Unassigned

Bug Description

Binary package hint: man-db

man-db provides no means for packages to add their manpages to the index; since updating occurs in cron.daily and cron.weekly, man pages for software newly installed don't show up in apropos or man -k until the following day.

This is a usability bug. Release dapper 6.06.

Revision history for this message
Kyle H (aerowolf) wrote :

The -f option, upon looking at the source, appears that it may do what needs to be done. The manpage for mandb(8) states that it's only for the use of man(1) when it discovers an out-of-date page. I am unable to determine the code from there. If -f does indeed allow an arbitrary manpage to be added to the index, then the documentation needs to be updated to explain that, and (possibly) the Ubuntu (and perhaps Debian) package standards examined for possible manpage addition requirements.

Revision history for this message
Colin Watson (cjwatson) wrote :

This is a long-standing issue, but in my opinion the only sane way to solve it is following the addition of triggers to dpkg so that man-db can say "run mandb after installing any packages that ship files in /usr/share/man". I am not particularly keen on modifying every package that ships a man page to update the database a package at a time; that would take ages to deploy and would be slower than just running mandb once at the end.

Revision history for this message
Colin Watson (cjwatson) wrote :

This is also bug 50110.

Changed in man-db:
importance: Undecided → Wishlist
status: Unconfirmed → Confirmed
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