Description of problem: I don't need makewhatis, but I can't easily deactive it's cron job (modifing stuff in /etc/cron.*/ does not count IMHO because that's ugly) -- that's really annoying because it creates hard-disk and CPU load now and then that's wasted in my eyes, creates noise and consumes power. There could be two easy solutions afaics: - create a seperate subpackage for whatis that gets installed by default. I can then simply delete it and everything is fine for everyone - pjones suggested in #fedora-devel that the above seems like a mediocre solution to him. pjones further: "why not just have an "/etc/sysconfig/makewhatis" that tells the job whether to actually do anything or not"
This problem sould be solved by editing cron jobs. There is no need to add new option to disable/enable makewhatis script.
(In reply to comment #1) > This problem sould be solved by editing cron jobs. There is no need to add new > option to disable/enable makewhatis script. Enabling cron jobs has several disadvantages - the modified files may get overwritten on each update - if the files are marked correctly and %config in the spec file then rpm will place a .rpmnew file in the proper place on each update. People like me, that periodically scan there filesystem for rpmnew files have to look at those file each time. That sucks. Reopening. BTW, I can provide a patch to fix this. Just tell me what solution you might prefer (see first comment in this bug).
Your argument seems very reasonably. The option (MAKEWHATISDBUPDATES) was added to man.config file - patch is in man-1.6d-3. If there is any problem with this option please reopen this bug.