Bug#684235: warning: can't update index cache ...: Resource temporarily unavailable

[Vincent Lefevre]

Package: man-db
Version: 2.6.2-1
Severity: normal

I got in the cron.daily mail:

/usr/bin/mandb: warning: can't update index cache /var/cache/man/index.db: Resource temporarily unavailable

The file is:

-rw-r--r-- 1 man root 2501981 2012-08-08 01:14:40 /var/cache/man/index.db

According to its timestamp and the syslog file, its last modification
happened while cron.daily was processed. The file is on the local file
system, mounted on /.

(The machine was rebooted a bit earlier.)

-- System Information:
Debian Release: wheezy/sid
APT prefers unstable
APT policy: (500, 'unstable'), (500, 'testing'), (500, 'stable'), (1, 'experimental')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)

Kernel: Linux 3.2.0-3-amd64 (SMP w/2 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=POSIX, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash

Versions of packages man-db depends on:
ii bsdmainutils 9.0.3
ii debconf [debconf-2.0] 1.5.45
ii dpkg 1.16.8
ii groff-base 1.21-9
ii libc6 2.13-35
ii libgdbm3 1.8.3-11
ii libpipeline1 1.2.1-1
ii zlib1g 1:1.2.7.dfsg-13

man-db recommends no packages.

Versions of packages man-db suggests:
ii chromium [www-browser] 21.0.1180.57~r148591-1
ii elinks [www-browser] 0.12~pre5-8
ii epiphany-browser [www-browser] 3.4.2-1+build1
ii groff 1.21-9
ii iceweasel [www-browser] 10.0.6esr-2
ii less 444-4
ii links [www-browser] 2.7-1
ii links2 [www-browser] 2.7-1
ii lynx-cur [www-browser] 2.8.8dev.12-2
ii midori [www-browser] 0.4.3-1
ii uzbl [www-browser] 0.0.0~git.20120514-1
ii w3m [www-browser] 0.5.3-8

-- debconf information:
* man-db/install-setuid: false
man-db/auto-update: true


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[Colin Watson]

Control: tag -1 fixed-upstream

On Wed, Aug 08, 2012 at 02:19:19AM +0200, Vincent Lefevre wrote:
> Package: man-db
> Version: 2.6.2-1
> Severity: normal
>
> I got in the cron.daily mail:
>
> /usr/bin/mandb: warning: can't update index cache /var/cache/man/index.db: Resource temporarily unavailable
>
> The file is:
>
> -rw-r--r-- 1 man root 2501981 2012-08-08 01:14:40 /var/cache/man/index.db
>
> According to its timestamp and the syslog file, its last modification
> happened while cron.daily was processed. The file is on the local file
> system, mounted on /.
>
> (The machine was rebooted a bit earlier.)

This usually means that another mandb process was running concurrently;
perhaps you were running dpkg and it raced with the cron job. There's
not much to be done about this except try again later, but I agree that
it's not a very useful warning to get in cron mail. I've downgraded
this to a debug message for my next upstream release.

Mon Jul 8 03:00:20 BST 2013 Colin Watson <cjwa...@debian.org>

* src/check_mandirs.c (gripe_rwopen_failed, update_db_time):
Downgrade EAGAIN/EWOULDBLOCK errors from attempts to open a
database read-write to debug messages (Debian bug #684235).

Thanks,

--
Colin Watson [cjwa...@debian.org]