Arch Linux

Description:

man-db.service rebuilds the manpage cache and is by default triggered periodically (daily) by man-db.timer. This is a loose and unclean solution at best and an unreliable or even a non-working one at worst in some scenarios (read-only root for example). It's a more or less serious limitation of current implementation of man-db.

Now in Arch we have a possibility of an event-driven solution in form of a Pacman/alpm hook that would fire after any package change (installation, update or removal of a package). The hook only needs to run the man-db.service on such occasion and man-db.timer can be then finally masked.

I know this is not the best place for implementing new features, but this one is pacman-dependent and therefore Arch-specific. I'm going to propose a general solution to man-db devs as well, but I think they know and man-db.timer is their universal solution. Also, other package managers may not have the same hook capabilities.

So the man-db.timer is the default approach that shouldn't be invalidated by the package. However, I'm proposing a feature for the package to also provide a Pacman/alpm hook to run man-db.service and that user is notified during the installation that there is an event-driven approach available. It would probably require masking man-db.timer and linking the hook into /etc/pacman.d/hooks by the user.

Additional info:
* package version: 2.11.0-1