Bug 437990

Summary: switch to man-db project
Product: [Fedora] Fedora Reporter: Stepan Kasal <kasal>
Component: manAssignee: Ivana Varekova <varekova>
Status: CLOSED NOTABUG QA Contact: Fedora Extras Quality Assurance <extras-qa>
Severity: low Docs Contact:
Priority: low    
Version: rawhide   
Target Milestone: ---   
Target Release: ---   
Hardware: All   
OS: Linux   
URL: http://www.nongnu.org/man-db/
Whiteboard:
Fixed In Version: Doc Type: Bug Fix
Doc Text:
Story Points: ---
Clone Of: Environment:
Last Closed: 2008-05-12 08:59:53 UTC Type: ---
Regression: --- Mount Type: ---
Documentation: --- CRM:
Verified Versions: Category: ---
oVirt Team: --- RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
Cloudforms Team: --- Target Upstream Version:
Embargoed:

Description Stepan Kasal 2008-03-18 15:52:01 UTC
There are two forks of the man program available.
John W. Eaton, who started writing the man program back in 1990 and 1991, kind
of recommends man-db (http://www.nongnu.org/man-db/), see
http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.sysutils.autoconf.general/10236/match=man-db+versions+two

BTW, Debian and SuSE distributions do use man-db instead of man-1*.tar.

Comment 1 Stepan Kasal 2008-05-12 08:20:36 UTC
I should have writen some reasons:

man-db uses Berkeley db instead of text file for the index of man pages, so
searching for man pages with whatis (man -k) anmd apropos (man -f) shall be
quicker.  This sounds nice, but it is not a strong reason, as I have never heard
about any performance problems with these commands.

man-db uses autotools, and consequently has better support for GNU coding
standards, and is more portable to non-Linux systems.  The former might help us
with packaging in the long run, but it not so important when we have man-1.6x
well domesticated in our spec file.  The latter (portability) is not directly
relevant here.

man-db seems to be kind of popular: Debian (incl. Ubuntru) and SuSE has selected
it as their only man implementation.  OTOH, Mandrike has the old one, as we
have, and Gentoo provides ebuilds for both.

To sum up, there seems to be no strong reason for man-db, co my cry "switch to"
was not justified.
OTOH, I think we should remember man-db as a possible alternative.  If man-db
becomes dominant in the future, we might decide to "go with the crowd," but it
is not so at the moment.

Comment 2 Ivana Varekova 2008-05-12 08:59:53 UTC
Thanks for your justification, for now I leave Federico Lucifredi's man in
fedora,  if there is any new fact/reason to change the upstream, please reopen
this bug and add a comment here.