Re: Getting rid of the mandb profile hook?

[Ricardo Wurmus]

Ludovic Courtès <ludo@gnu.org> writes:

> I’m thinking we could get rid of the mandb hook.

Yes, please!

>   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.

-- 
Ricardo