On Tue, Oct 30, 2018 at 10:27:22PM +0100, Eduard Bloch wrote: > I am no longer able to install many packages. The man-db hook keeps > running and running for ages. > > I have monitored it with strace and it seems to run over the same files > in man1 folder all over again, never ending. See the logs (also > filtered for open* syscalls): > > https://www.unix-ag.uni-kl.de/~bloch/misc/wtf_mandb_dead_loop.txt.gz > https://www.unix-ag.uni-kl.de/~bloch/misc/wtf_mandb_dead_loop.strace.log
Are you sure it's looping endlessly? Your logs don't support that theory. Some file names are repeated, but that's because they're the basenames of manual pages that exist in a number of different languages. I haven't so far seen any page being processed more than once in your log. (Note that each file is opened twice in relatively quick succession for different phases of processing, which is a little bit suboptimal but not evidence of an endless loop.) I think what's happening is simply that man-db was rebuilt against a new version of gdbm and therefore has to rebuild its database from scratch, and that this is unfortunately rather slow. I'd need more evidence to determine that there's an endless-loop-type bug here. -- Colin Watson [cjwat...@debian.org]
