FFe: man-db 2.7.0

[Colin Watson]

I'm intending to release man-db 2.7.0 in a week or two, and would like it to be considered for utopic as well, principally due to the performance improvements listed at the end of the NEWS block which follows. The only reason for the minor version bump is the database format change due to my work on high-precision timestamps; otherwise I consider this incremental improvements, although not bug-fix-only.

You can see the full list of changes here:

  http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/man-db.git/log/

man-db 2.7.0
============

Major changes since man-db 2.6.7.1:

        Upgrading from previous versions:
        ---------------------------------

        For the first time since version 2.4.0, the database format has
        changed slightly, so you will need to run 'mandb --create' after
        installing the new version to rebuild your databases from scratch.
        (Distribution packages should do this automatically for system
        databases.)

        Fixes:
        ------

        o lexgrog now filters terminal escape sequences out of cat pages
          before trying to parse them.

        o Tools that consider the terminal line length now prioritise the
          COLUMNS environment variable above the TIOCGWINSZ ioctl.

        Improvements:
        -------------

        o Ship a systemd tmpfiles snippet to clean up old cat files after a
          week.

        o The modification time of manual databases is now simply stored in
          the mtime of the database files themselves, rather than using a
          special row. This makes databases reproducible between
          otherwise-identical installations, as long as the underlying
          database has predictable behaviour. As a bonus, man-db now uses
          high-precision timestamps to determine whether it needs to update
          databases.

        o Timestamps of manual pages are also now stored in the database
          with high precision and compared accordingly.

        o Files are now ordered by first physical extent before reading
          them, for substantial performance improvements in operations such
          as mandb and 'man -K'.

[Iain Lane (laney)]

I feel like I'd be happiest if this could get in before the beta. But either way, the changes sound incremental enough - approved.

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

Thanks. I'll probably withdraw the request if it isn't ready by the final beta; at this point it depends on how quickly I get translation updates.