On December 5, 2020, "Ludovic Courtès" <ludo@gnu.org> wrote:

many actions should be done lazily, in particular populating caches.

Absolutely.

I’m thinking we could get rid of the mandb hook.

Please.

1. Provide a ‘man’ wrapper or modify the ‘man-db’ package such that
the database gets built on the first use of ‘man -k’, unless it’s
already up-to-date.

I vote for this one. Anything work we can defer to make package operations near-instantaneous will help me make Guix a seamless part of my computing workflows. As things stand, adopting Guix comes along with regular "pause to wait for Guix to think about something you probably don't care about" breaks.