Files located under /var/cache may be expired in an application specific manner, by the system administrator, or both. The application must always be able to recover from manual deletion of these files (generally because of a disk space shortage). No other requirements are made on the data format of the cache directories.
"/var/cache" fonts man www <package> |
"Cache directories" Locally-generated fonts (optional) Locally-formatted manual pages (optional) WWW proxy or cache data (optional) Package specific cache data (optional) |
Tree 5.5.2.1
The directory /var/cache/fonts should be used to store any dynamically-created fonts. In particular, all of the fonts which are automatically generated by mktexpk must be located in appropriately-named subdirectories of /var/cache/fonts.[footnote 31]
The structure of /var/cache/man needs to reflect both the fact of multiple man page hierarchies and the possibility of multiple language support.
Given an unformatted manual page that normally appears in <path>/man/<locale>/man<section>, the directory to place formatted man pages in is /var/cache/man/<catpath>/<locale>/cat<section>, where <catpath> is derived from <path> by removing any leading usr and/or trailing share pathname components.[footnote 32] (Note that the <locale> component may be missing.)
Man pages written to /var/cache/man may eventually be transferred to the appropriate preformatted directories in the source man hierarchy or expired; likewise formatted man pages in the source man hierarchy may be expired if they are not accessed for a period of time.
If preformatted manual pages come with a system on read-only media (a CD-ROM, for instance), they must be installed in the source man hierarchy (e.g. /usr/share/man/cat<section>). /var/cache/man is reserved as a writable cache for formatted manual pages.
[31] This standard does not currently incorporate the TeX Directory Structure (a document that describes the layout TeX files and directories), but it may be useful reading. It is located at ftp://ctan.tug.org/tex/.
[32] For example, /usr/share/man/man1/ls.1 is formatted into /var/cache/man/cat1/ls.1, and /usr/X11R6/man/<locale>/man3/XtClass.3x into /var/cache/man/X11R6/<locale>/cat3/XtClass.3x.