[root at localhost.localdomain: Anacron job 'cron.daily' on loki]

[Derek Broughton]

Colin Watson wrote:

> On Tue, Feb 21, 2006 at 10:10:45AM -0400, Derek Broughton wrote:
>> Bas van Gils wrote:
>> > Every now and then I get these mails on my work machine (running
>> > breezy). Does anyone know how to get rid of these annoying messages?
>> ...
>> > ----- Forwarded message from Anacron <root at localhost.localdomain> -----
>> > 
>> > From: Anacron <root at localhost.localdomain>
>> ...
>> > /etc/cron.daily/man-db:
>> > mandb: warning: /usr/share/man/man1/rmic.1.gz is a dangling symlink
>> > 
>> > 
>> > ----- End forwarded message -----
>> 
>> mandb runs out of /etc/cron.daily/man-db to update the man database.  You
>> don't really want to remove it (though, for a personal-use machine it
>> probably doesn't need to run that often).  You can simply delete the
>> dangling symlink (left behind when a package was changed - odds are it'll
>> automatically get fixed at some future date, but there's no need to
>> wait).
> 
> It would be nice to know where this particular dangling symlink comes
> from. I know that it was provided by some Java virtual machine package,
> but there are several different packages that provide the rmic
> alternative and I have no straightforward way of finding out which one
> is buggy. Bas, do you have any information on which JVMs you've had
> installed on your system, now or in the past?
> 
Yeah, that's the problem I've always found with these dangling symlinks -
you've already (perhaps a while ago, before noticing the mandb error)
performed the upgrade and it's hard to guess what might have caused the
change, when "dpkg -S" will, by definition, not show you anything :-(
-- 
derek