mlocate - what is it good for?

[Bryan Quigley]

The mentioned Debian bug #880507 is one of the advantages of moving from
cron to systemd units -see proposed unit file in [1].  The timers in
systemd are really perfect for this...

I use locate all the time.  I really like how much simpler it is then
find.  I don't have to think to usually get what I'm looking for.  I'm
going to experiment with using grep <filename> /var/lib/dpkg/info/*.list as
the majority of files I run locate for are from packages..

>From a product perspective it does make sense to remove:
 * Desktop has tracker installed by default.  The majority of users will
use that instead as it's integrated with the GUI.
 * The majority of cloud/server deployments aren't interactive these days.
It's a waste there.

They key group I can see wanting it are developers - who can install it.

My 2 cents,
Bryan

[1] https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=882993



On Wed, May 22, 2019 at 7:09 PM Brian Murray <brian at ubuntu.com> wrote:

> 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
>
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