Friday 24 May 2019

Re: mlocate - what is it good for?

Hey Steve,

Le 24/05/2019 à 00:33, Steve Langasek a écrit :
>> Takes over 30 seconds (on a machine which not doing any other work)
>> where mlocate takes around 1 second on the same machine... and I do
>> personally find 30 seconds to be too long.
> I agree that 30 seconds is too long, but as a user of find I find this usage
> surprising, why would you be searching the whole root disk for the file?

I just used the same example than Julian gave so we would compare the
same things (but picked a file that I know existed on my disk), I agree
that the command/example doesn't make much sense.

> Anyway, agreed that 30s is too long. Would you be annoyed if the solution
> to that 30s being too long was "get tired of waiting, run 'locate', get told
> it's not installed, apt install mlocate, run 'locate' again"?

No, I think it would be fine. Locate isn't going to be useful on "throw
away" installations/VMs since on a fresh install the index is not going
to be there, and if you have an installed machine you use then
installing the machine is a one action easy action.

> indexers on your desktop system - both tracker and mlocate. It looks like
> nautilus currently depends on tracker, so I'm not sure how one would
> uninstall it and usefully fall back to the mlocate backend anyway, but at
> most I'd say this should be expressed as 'Depends: tracker | mlocate' in
> nautilus, and not have mlocate kept around on the system updating its
> database daily just in case a user removes tracker.

Right, GNOME sort of forced our hands there since several features in
nautilus now rely on tracker so yes I agree with you, our default
Desktop indexer is tracker and it's probably good enough for most users.
Those who need mlocate can go an install it from the archive, we
probably don't need it pre-installed on the desktop image.


Cheers,
Sebastien Bacher


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