The current man package provides the whatis function, and a cron.daily entry to run it.

According to the whatis manpage, is MANPATH is unset (which we do by default in /etc/profile), it uses the output of "man --path" to specify locations to create whatis databases for.

[root@Muspelheimr ~]# man --path
/usr/share/man:/opt/java/man:/opt/java/jre/man:/usr/man:/usr/local/man

In all of these locations, a whatis database is generated daily. The problem is that they are not owned by the man package.

[root@Muspelheimr ~]# man --path | sed 's|:|\n|g' | while read manpath; do ls -lh "${manpath}/whatis"; done
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 392K 2008-04-27 00:06 /usr/share/man/whatis
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 3.2K 2008-04-27 00:06 /opt/java/man/whatis
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 588 2008-04-27 00:06 /opt/java/jre/man/whatis
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 3.0M 2008-04-27 00:06 /usr/man/whatis
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 0 2008-04-27 00:06 /usr/local/man/whatis
[root@Muspelheimr ~]# man --path | sed 's|:|\n|g' | while read manpath; do pacman -Qo "${manpath}/whatis"; done
error: No package owns /usr/share/man/whatis
error: No package owns /opt/java/man/whatis
error: No package owns /opt/java/jre/man/whatis
error: No package owns /usr/man/whatis
error: No package owns /usr/local/man/whatis


I'm not sure what the best way to handle this is. if you add these files in the build fucntion, then it will conflict with installed systems which already have the files. Is there a way to say "This package owns these files, but if they exist on the filesystem already, don't overwrite them?" I suppose you could add the whatis databases to backup=(), with a notice in the post_upgrade function, but are they always the same files for every system?