mlocate - what is it good for?

[Brian Murray]

The Ubuntu Foundations team was recently looking at an issue with
mlocate[1] and the effect it has on all users of Ubuntu. While that
specific issue is fixable there are also issues[2,3] with keeping
PRUNEFS and PRUNEPATHS current in updatedb.conf. So we ended up
questioning the usefulness of installing mlocate by default on systems
at all. We believe that find is an adequate replacement for mlocate but
want to hear from you about use cases where it may not be. I'll start
with a personal example:

"I don't remember (because I need to know so infrequently) where the
meta-release file is cached on disk by update-manager and use locate to
find it. The find command itself is inadequate because the cached file
exists in both /home and /var."

[1] https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=880507
[2] http://launchpad.net/bugs/827841
[3] http://launchpad.net/bugs/1823518

Thanks,
--
Brian Murray