Hi folks, It would be very nice if mandb could ignore remote disks. There would be at least 2 advantages: Several mandb running on different hosts at the same time wouldn't interfere with each other. Mandb would terminate within one day in my environment. Regards Harri
severity 90522 wishlist thanks Harald Dunkel <dunkel@synopsys.COM>, 90522@bugs.debian.org wrote: Isn't this a configuration issue? While /etc/manpath.config isn't a dpkg-handled conffile, it won't be gratuitously overwritten, so you can remove MANDB_MAP entries for remotely mounted partitions. You'll find a description of that file in manpath(5). I don't think it's really mandb's job to work out which disks are local and which aren't; some of the hierarchies it typically manages are very often mounted on different local partitions, and it seems like a bad idea to put knowledge of mount types into mandb. I can see that that would be useful. :) Regards,
Colin Watson wrote: I have already excluded /usr/local/man in mandb.conf of my Debian hosts, but each time I have configured a new machine, I have forgotten this manual step again. I guess it is more efficient and reasonable to make mandb ignore NFS disks per default. The NFS server machine will be much faster on creating the man page index. (Of course there is the special case that the NFS server is too stupid to create an index, cause it is a network device, for example.) mandb could verify whether a disk is local using 'find', as it is done by updatedb. Updatedb has a list of allowed file systems in /etc/updatedb.conf . Regards Harri
It will be faster, that's true. Unfortunately the -fstype option to find is not portable (I've just checked the Single Unix Specification), and man-db works on more systems than just Debian. updatedb is compiled from the same source as GNU find, so doesn't have this problem. I also don't want to duplicate lots of code from GNU find, as I don't track their development and don't want to have to fix their bugs in parallel. If you can come up with a portable solution, let me know; I'm not really enthusiastic about maintaining a Debian-specific solution. For installing lots of machines, I recommend you try out something like fai, so that you can duplicate configuration across multiple machines relatively easily. Regards,
tags 90522 wontfix thanks Unless somebody can come up with a way to do this portably, I don't intend to put any knowledge of filesystem types into mandb.