Hello Jan and Allan, Jan Stary wrote on Sun, Oct 05, 2025 at 08:36:28PM +0200: > On Oct 05 12:33:09, [email protected] wrote:
>> The install guide suggests removing everything in /usr/include/ before >> upgrading, is there similar advice for other /usr/ directories? > Removing /usr/include is hardly a move to earn you much more space, > rather it makes sure you don't have stale headers around. Right. > I remove /usr/share/man before a sysupdate. I believe you mean sysupgrade(8). I like that advice, i often do the same. Stale manual pages are not quite as bad as stale headers, but they do occur, in particular when manual pages are combined or renamed or outright deleted, and stale pages *can* cause confusion. For example, imagine we have foobar(3) and foobaz(3) manuals and a developer decides to move the description of foobaz(3) into the existing foobar(3) manual page, in which case the .Dt line of foobar(3) typically remains unchanged. Now, as long as you use the unchanged mandoc.db(5) file generated by the release build, "man foobaz" should show the right page because the database does not know about the cvs rm'ed file. But as soon as you run makewhatis(8), "man foobaz" will the typically show the old, stale page instead because makewhatis(8) found it and because the old page has the name "foobaz" in .Dt, giving it a higher priority in man(1). I have often wondered whether we should make something like the advice you, Jan, are providing official, but haven't figured out yet whether and how to do that. The only downside i can see is that some people may install site-specific manual pages that they have written themselves and that come neither from the base system nor from ports into /usr/share/man/ - but i consider that a bad habit in the first place. If you need site-specific manuals you wrote youself, install them somewhere outside /usr/share/ and /usr/local/ and add the site-specific path to man.conf(5). That's certainly how i am doing it when i need it. Don't mess with the base system, don't mess with ports, put your own homegrown stuff elsewhere. Yours, Ingo
