user man...@packages.debian.org usertags 620947 target-2.6.1 thanks On Tue, Apr 05, 2011 at 11:00:25AM +0200, Jörg-Volker Peetz wrote: > The daily cron-job of man-db changes the modification time of the localization > sub-directories in /var/cache/man/, e.g., /var/cache/man/de, also the > sub-directories only contain files with older modification times. Example: > > $ ls -lFa /var/cache/man/de > total 24 > drwxr-sr-x 7 man root 160 Apr 5 07:35 ./ > drwxr-sr-x 35 man root 720 Apr 5 07:35 ../ > drwxr-sr-x 2 man root 40 Apr 4 08:06 cat1/ > drwxr-sr-x 2 man root 40 Apr 4 08:06 cat3/ > drwxr-sr-x 2 man root 40 Apr 4 08:06 cat5/ > drwxr-sr-x 2 man root 40 Apr 4 08:06 cat7/ > drwxr-sr-x 2 man root 40 Apr 4 08:06 cat8/ > -rw-r--r-- 1 man root 23225 Apr 4 08:06 index.db > > So this results in some (unnecessary) write operations on the storage device. > This is disadvantageous in terms of effort and wear (especially on SSDs). > > I did not dig through the source code of mandb to get an idea why this > happens. > Maybe for the maintainer of the package it is obvious. Otherwise, I could try > to > identify the cause, if desired.
Thanks for your report. #619726 covers some of this, but there's a problem in mandb itself as well: it creates a temporary database before knowing whether it will need to do any real writes. In order to fix this, some code from the mandb function will need to be pushed down to testmandirs or thereabouts. I'll look into this for 2.6.1. (CCing Iustin so that he doesn't feel the need to reopen #619726 if he discovers that it doesn't account for all of the writes ...) -- Colin Watson [cjwat...@debian.org] -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-bugs-dist-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
