Description of problem: Presently, man-db has a hard-dependency on cron. It seems as though this is used to periodically update the manpage database. Unfortunately, as someone who really doesn't need cron for anything, this also forces cron to remain installed on the system, whether or not the user requires it. Is it possible that this dependency could be eliminated ? man-db is used on other distros without forcing the update only through cron (and instead, at package install time, updating, etc); I haven't quite investigated how this is handled in fedora, but it seems that I can at least immediately view man pages for recently installed packages, so surely a post-install hook is taking care of things generally with package transactions. Is it possible to eliminate this as a hard-dep for man-db? I understand alternatives exist for having cron not run (by masking the service via. systemd), but it seems rather weird by default that man-db is the only thing forcing cron to remain on the system for a fresh installation.
Hello, thanks for your report. I understand what you mean. I am suggesting to remove hard-dependency on cron, but keep the cron.daily file, so the database can be updated if the cron is installed. Also, update the man DB after installation or update of the man-db package. The man DB is not necessary for viewing man pages, so I don't think this should be a problem. What do you think? Thanks, peter
Hi Peter, Thanks for the response! I actually didn't know that the db didn't need to be updated regularly for proper man page viewing. Installing the cron file definitely seems harmless, as most people will probably be running cron still. It seems like installing cron by default is definitely desirable still, but should be opt-out-able for the user. Since systemd has added the journal, things like the syslogger+logrotate seem relatively unimportant to some people, so the requirement of cron for those may be decreasing. The ability to uninstall would be great, as opposed to managing masking the services for such cases. Thanks again.
It looks like this will also allow the user to remove rsyslog cleanly, which had had a similar rsyslog -> logrotate -> cron -> man-db chain that made it tough to purge from a system. As a happy systemd-journald user who doesn't really need a full-blown system logger any more, this is great! Thanks again for taking the time to check this out.
Fixed in: man-db-2.6.1-1.fc18 http://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/buildinfo?buildID=311838
Hi Peter, Great, thanks! Any plans to build an F17 package too? Might be nice to have rsyslog and such removable by the user, especially after systemd has gained journald. Cheers, Andrew
Hi Andrew, I'll build an F17 package too, don't worry ;-) I am just checking other bugs for the man-db I can fix in F17.. peter
I've tested this for a couple weeks too, and it seems to not have any negative impact that I can tell. Would be great to sneak it in before F17 final :-) Thanks again for taking the time to consider removing this dependency!
man-db-2.6.0.2-5.fc17 has been submitted as an update for Fedora 17. https://admin.fedoraproject.org/updates/man-db-2.6.0.2-5.fc17
Package man-db-2.6.0.2-5.fc17: * should fix your issue, * was pushed to the Fedora 17 testing repository, * should be available at your local mirror within two days. Update it with: # su -c 'yum update --enablerepo=updates-testing man-db-2.6.0.2-5.fc17' as soon as you are able to. Please go to the following url: https://admin.fedoraproject.org/updates/FEDORA-2012-6672/man-db-2.6.0.2-5.fc17 then log in and leave karma (feedback).
man-db-2.6.0.2-5.fc17 has been pushed to the Fedora 17 stable repository. If problems still persist, please make note of it in this bug report.