Point. On the other hand, I'm suggesting a small incremental
improvement.
In order of difficulty:
1. Move mlocate to /etc/cron.weekly/. (Very easy.)
2. Only update system dirs (i.e. /) if dpkg has been run. (Easy.)
3. Split updates of / and /home. (Hard.)
4. Update system dirs when dpkg is run.
4a. Parse /var/log/dpkg.log and see what's been done since previous update
invocation. (Hard)
4b. Asynchronously tie into dpkg invocation so as to keep database up-to-date
with no latency. (Very hard.)
For something as minor as the locate database, I'm not suggesting we put
in a lot of work; it'll be diminishing returns very shortly. However, I
believe that 1, 2, and 3 are doable.
We can easily integrate 1.
For 2, I can give you the logic of *when* to update /, but actually doing it is
reliant on 3. See below.
For 3, I can update /home, or / and /home, but not just /. I'm unable to
update *just* the system dirs. Hopefully someone else will be able to figure
out what I'm not seeing.
For the here-and-now, I note the existence of /var/log/dpkg.*. An
enterprising someone could use the date of those files, or parsing the
final line of dpkg.log as a measure of when to update. That would be a
very simple addition to the mlocate script. For example, here's an
example script to only update the system dirs if necessary:
#!/bin/sh
DPKG_FILE='/var/log/dpkg.log'
UPD_FILE='/var/log/last_updatedb'
if [ ! -f "$UPD_FILE" ]; then
touch -t 197001010000.00 "$UPD_FILE" # Didn't exist, initialize to
"zero"
echo "Locate database not yet created."
fi
LAST_APT_USAGE=`date -r "$DPKG_FILE" +"%s"` # output in epoch seconds
LAST_UPDATE=`date -r "$UPD_FILE" +"%s"` # output in epoch seconds
if [ $LAST_UPDATE != $LAST_APT_USAGE ]; then
# The timestamps of files suggest the database is not in sync. So ...
# 1. Update the database
# The part I don't know how to do is to only update entries
relating
# to a single directory or filesystem, so I leave that part to
someone else.
# 2. Locate database now in sync. Let next invocation know when:
touch --reference "$DPKG_FILE" "$UPD_FILE"
fi
--
updatedb should be weekly, not daily
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/271272
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