man-db without cache update (no cron or systemd *.timer)

["Jóhann B. Guðmundsson"]

On 10/16/2014 01:30 PM, Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek wrote:
> On Thu, Oct 16, 2014 at 10:35:13AM +0200, Jan Chaloupka wrote:
>> Forwarding Colin's response
>> =================================
>>
>>
>> On Wed, Oct 15, 2014 at 09:47:41AM -0500, Chris Adams wrote:
>>> Once upon a time, Jan Chaloupka <jchaloup at redhat.com> said:
>>>> there has been a discussion about if we need cache for man-db for users
>>>> which use man pages or update system only from time to time and thus
>>>> don't need to update cache every day. man-db as it is now depends on
>>>> systemd which brings another set of packages. The use case is "I just
>>>> want to read man page. So I install man which on the other hand download
>>>> another set of packages. I want to read man page and it downloads systemd.".
>> Have you considered installing the timer file, but without the
>> dependency?  If systemd is there, it could use it, otherwise not.  That
>> would make a whole lot more sense to me than creating another package,
>> and would be my recommendation.
> Nope, this is not going to work. If there's no dependency on systemd
> then during installation rpm can install man-db before systemd and
> and the timer will not get enabled. Currently it is not possible to
> install systemd units without a dependency on systemd.

Right which in turn will lead up to the scenario I tried to explain 
thousand times with FESCO that we would end up having components depend 
on systemd when they should not and with absolutely no benefit of and 
worse outcome as well as more frustrating aministrator/enduser 
experience than continuing to use cron for those jobs as well as 
obfuscating the work of those working on cleaning up the core/baseOS.

If it would have made sense to migrate every cron job to timer units I 
would have written and filed a feature proposal then and there which 
would achieve exactly that but the fact is that systemd timers and 
cronie are two component that complement each others short comings and 
systemd has quite few of those shortcomings compared to cron.

Unfortunately people only seem to see the outcome for their own 
component or their ( cloud ) product instead of thinking about the whole.

If people are so inclined and anxious to drop that cron job then they 
should spend their time and energy and write that rpm trigger(s) for man 
in accordance with what Peter Schiffer said as opposed to try to 
implement this with timer units and or workaround the FPG.

JBG