Deprecating slocate for desktop users?

[Timo Jyrinki]

Hi,

Are there still grounds for keeping slocate in cron.daily for desktop 
users? At least I'm annoyed by it running on my computers every day, and 
I always either remove it or move it to cron.monthly for the occasional 
use. Still, I think there is no GUI for it anyway, and everyone's home 
directories are now indexed by Tracker, so what's the point?

Also, Fedora has moved from slocate to mlocate [1], which reduces the hard 
drive burning if locate service is still needed (eg. for servers). Even if 
slocate is nowadays ionice:d, it still burns the hdd for a considerable 
amount each time, since it always reindexes the whole disk (unless 
cached), especially for people who have hundreds of gigabytes of 
stuff on their hdd.

[1] http://carolina.mff.cuni.cz/~trmac/blog/mlocate/

I'd believe I'm not the only one annoyed by it being included in the 
default installation. Both moving to mlocate plus moving it to run weekly 
or removing slocate completely would sound good to me if compared to the 
current situation, but also I'd like to hear if there are any reasons to 
keep the current behavior there, still.

Ok, just when I was going to send this I thought about another google 
search, and found a good bug report [2] and a discussion thread from 
September [3]

[2] https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/slocate/+bug/140493
[3] https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel-discuss/2007-September/001646.html

There it looked like it's mainly wanted to be kept on servers. Most people 
don't use it at all, and the discussing persons on this list are surely of 
the more advanced type. One of the strongest arguments seems to be 
just that locate is as standard of a Unix tool like man is, and some 
long-time user would miss it (which was countered by that it can be easily 
installed). But Sebastian Bacher's last post [4] mentioned the fact that 
removing locate would break gnome-search-tools - is that something still 
relevant with deskbar-applet and Tracker?

[4] https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel-discuss/2007-September/001681.html

If locate cannot be removed for hardy, like I stated I'd at least like it 
to be moved to cron.weekly or cron.monthly on desktop installations and 
replaced with mlocate (already packaged in Debian and Ubuntu) as a kind 
of an emergency measure for all the people frustrated with its indexing.

-Timo