Adeodato Simó wrote: > I'm preparing packages for mlocate, and personally I would like to > upload it with Priority: standard. But I'm open to be convinced that is > not a good idea (eg. "standard is already bloated"). > > I think having a working /usr/bin/locate is a reasonable expectation for > a Linux system nowadays, so the priority level would fit. I am aware of > course that findutils already provides one implementation, and it's > Priority: required...
... and Essential: yes since it contains find and xargs, making it impossible to remove on a normal system. I personally would much rather see locate split out of findutils and made optional. This would avoid the need to disable updatedb on any new system installation. While I do not have any numbers to back this up, I strongly suspect that the majority of people who have updatedb installed and running daily nevertheless do not use locate. I don't think that would need a transition, either; while scripts could theoretically count on the availability of locate, they could not count on it working or providing up-to-date results, so they couldn't reasonably make use of it. A scan of Debian packages would hopefully find no calls to locate, and any such call would almost certainly constitute a bug. Perhaps Lintian and Linda could check for this, much like the check for debconf-is-not-a-registry. In any case, I definitely do not think that any other locate implementation should have priority standard or higher as long as findutils (Essential: yes) contains locate. However... > However, I would very much like to have a *better* implementation > installed by default, and I think mlocate would be very appropriate for > the job: [...] > * mlocate keeps timestamps in its database, so when running updatedb > it can determine if the contents of a directory have changed without > having to read its contents; this makes the update faster, and less > demanding on the harddist (that's where the name comes from, "merge > locate") That alone makes it far far better than the standard locate, and depending on how well it works, I can imagine actually using it at least on non-laptop systems. Thus, I would argue that: * No locate should have standard priority as long as findutils contains locate. * locate should move out of findutils into a separate package. * Once that happens, if any locate should have priority standard, mlocate should. * However, I don't think any locate should have priority standard. - Josh Triplett
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