Package: man-db Version: 2.8.5-2 (This report was written before you drew my attention to
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/man-db/+bug/1411633 which is a report of the same issue. I'm filing it anyway so we have record of it in the Debian BTS and so that I have a record myself of where and what this is bug. Thanks for tolerating this.) My backup system, like many, relies on file mtimes to know when to back files up. *Un*like most other systems, it does a cross-check: it checks that the file *contents* (via checksum) are the same on the backed-up host and as is recorded in the backup. This seems to me to be a correct and cautious approach. On at least one occasion it has saved me from a serious problem by giving me early warning of a storage failure, by flagging up corruption in luckily-unimportant files. But it means that if a file is modified, but the mtime is reset, the backups fail. Empirically, this seems to happen with /var/cache/man/*/index.db. Please could man-db not do this. Specifically, if it modifies the file, I would like it to either not reset the time timestamp, or at least not set the timestamp to the same value it had before. Alternatively, possibly using a deterministic algorithm would work? (I think https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=760895 may be relevant.) Thanks, Ian. -- Ian Jackson <ijack...@chiark.greenend.org.uk> These opinions are my own. Pronouns: they/he. If I emailed you from @fyvzl.net or @evade.org.uk, that is a private address which bypasses my fierce spamfilter.
