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Right now, the whatis indexes are only rebuild weekly, presumably because it's a heavy-duty procedure; this can be a long wait in some circumstances. It would be nice if makewhatis.cron (or makewhatis itself) was more intelligent, and only rebuilt the whatis indexes if they were out of date. Then it would be sensible to run makewhatis.cron more often, such as every night.
Thank you for your suggestion. This has been passed on to a developer.
Seems like a weekly script to rebuild the database and a daily script to update the database would be about right...
Fixed in man-1.5g-2. makewhatis already had a -u option for doing fast updates to the database. There's now a weekly script that recreates the database and a daily script that updates it very quickly. makewhatis itself already had all the needed intelligence -- we just needed to harness it. We wouldn't want to avoid rebuilding the database once a week because the updates aren't sorted, just appended, and over time an actively-maintained system would end up with a rather messed-up database providing essentially random apropos output... Thanks for the suggestion!