mlocate - what is it good for?

[L. D. James]

On 5/24/19 6:12 PM, Steve Langasek wrote:
> On Thu, May 23, 2019 at 04:32:24AM +0200, Gunnar Hjalmarsson wrote:
>> On 2019-05-22 20:59, Brian Murray wrote:
>>> 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.
>> As a volunteer contributor and involved in support, I tend to use locate()
>> very often, and find() so seldom that I have to look up the syntax
>> everytime. If mlocate would be dropped from default, it would be one of the
>> first package I'd install when doing a fresh install.
>> Suitable to be added to ubuntu-dev-tools?
> My $.02, I think it's orthogonal to ubuntu-dev-tools and is not used in
> support of any of the tools in that package, so should not be added there.
There's a significant difference between find and locate... used for 
different purposes.  Find will scan the drive on every search, while 
locate will scan the database, which will bring faster results.

The OS would experience  a decrease in functionality with the lost of 
either.

-- L. James

-- 
L. D. James
ljames at apollo3.com
www.apollo3.com/~ljames