On Thu, Apr 10, 2014 at 09:14:39AM +1000, Scott Ferguson wrote:
> On 10/04/14 01:44, Mike McClain wrote:
> > The other day I noticed my computer clutteres up with many
> > directories in /var/cache/man/ for languages I don't speak so I
> > deleted them.
>
> That was a mistake. You're new to this "sysadmin" stuff right? ;)
Yeah, I've only been maintaining my own *nix system for 16 years.
> > Today they're back but I can't tell how they got there.
>
> That's good, it means your "delete what I don't like or understand"
> didn't create a huge problem.
I've never created such a problem that I had to re-install, anything
else is not a 'huge' problem.
>From your response I suspect you don't know what triggers the
re-creation of those unneeded directories.
> > Nothing in /etc/cron/* says anything about recreating them. I assume
> > mandb did it but can't tell what initiated the recreation of all
> > these directories. Nor can I see any need, I don't imagine very many
> > people speak all of those 23 languages. What is the purpose of having
> > all of them installed?
>
> Um, didn't *you* install them?
> Wouldn't that make it a rhetorical question?
> :)
I installed the whole system so in that manner you are correct but I
did not ask for all those other languages.
> The answer of course is that most people use characters and words from a
> number of languages. Those extra man pages don't take up a lot of space.
The fact that I like enchiladas doesn't mean I need spanish man pages.
> You have several options:-
> ;don't install all languages to start with (be selective during installs
> - don't install i18n packages if you don't want internationalization)
I didn't, the only packages installed that mention 'i18n' are:
debconf-i18n 1.5.49
libtext-wrapi18n-perl 0.06-7
and I certainly didn't ask that debconf be international.
> ;don't install man
Get real.
> ;install localpurge, select only the locales you are interested in, use
> it to purge other locales
Installed it years ago.
> > Is there a config file I can edit to limit which directories are
> > created?
>
> locales does that. Install localepurge to limit the locales supported by
> installed packages.
Not in this case.
/etc/locale.nopurge contains en en_US.UTF-8
/etc/locale.gen contains en_US.UTF-8 UTF-8
localepurge is triggered by dpkg, has no cron job and makes no mention
of /var/cache/ in it's documentation.
Since you brought it up I ran localepurge from the CL where it
mentions that it looks for /var/cache/localepurge/localelist which I
edited removing all but en_US*.
I ran localepurge again but it still doesn't touch
/var/cache/man/{cs,da,es,fr,...
If you know of a way to tell mandb not to recreate these unnecessary
directories I'd like to know about it.
Thanks,
Mike
--
"Education is a man's going from cocksure ignorance to thoughtful uncertainty."
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