mlocate - what is it good for?

[Michael Hudson-Doyle]

On Thu, 23 May 2019 at 09:07, 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 think this is a cattle vs pet sort of thing as well: on a system that
being used for development or adminned by multiple humans, locate is quite
useful. And the overhead of having to install it for systems like this
seems acceptable (users like these are exactly the sort of users for whom
installing a package is easy!).

On systems that are part of a fleet of automatically maintained machines,
all locate does is waste IO bandwidth -- which might well be a shared
resource if the systems are VMs.

My vote would be for removing it from the default install.

Cheers,
mwh
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