update-db cron job: solving a long-standing issue

[Milan]

Thilo: OK, I didn't realise that. I closed this outdated Bug 27918
consequently.


To Thilo and Mark and Scott:
You agree that the operation of installing slocate is a piece of cake
for an admin or a power user, and even if it is "surprising", it's not
an issue for them. We can keep locate on the servers, because of the way
they work and of the users that are likely to log on them.

Thilo said:
> Yes i think also the absence of 'locate' would be suprising to anyone
who has
> used any distro before.
Not anyone, only admins, which are not likely to be afraid. I consider
myself as a power user, and I never used locate, because I disabled it
and I know that find can do the job when you know in which subtree to look.

No standard user will ever wonder "Where did I put that file again?" for
a file out of his home, and Tracker is here for it. Furthermore, there's
no need to be able to find system files except for admins, which
mechanically know how to install slocate. I'm not sure slocate should be
connected with Tracker by default, since standard users don't want to be
annoyed by system files when searching. We should never keep our admin
point of view, but think of newbie Desktop users: I'm often amazed of
the problems some simple features can bring about for these users, where
I would have solved it in two minutes.

As Vincenzo said, "often "dpkg -S" can replace locate": it is true for a
significant part of the system files (though not for all of them, or
locate wouldn't exist).

It's normal that kio-locate is installed by default with
kubuntu-desktop, since slocate is too. But we can safely remove
kio-locate from kubuntu-desktop deps:
$ apt-cache rdepends kio-locate
kio-locate
Reverse Depends:
  kubuntu-desktop
  ichthux-desktop

IMHO, the minimum we can do is using ionice and moving (as you said) the
cron job to cron.weekly. using rlocate could be good, but this should be
investigated more, and this is still something making the system slower,
for a void overall interest in most Desktop cases. According to Bugs
134692 and 13671, ionice is not working well at the time, and that would
make harder solving the issue.

Anyway, I'm glad the debate is raised; whatever the choice will be, it
will enhance Ubuntu.