[SM-Discuss] Anyone interested in a mlocate spell?

Eric Sandall eric at sandall.us
Mon Nov 17 19:18:22 EST 2008


Quoting "Ethan Grammatikidis" <eekee57 at fastmail.fm>:
> It may be complicated, but the locate bundled with findutils is not
> appropriate for some systems. It shows the existence of files that a
> user should not ordinarily be able to see. Mlocate, being derived from
> slocate (secure locate), doesn't have this issue. Also I remember
> findutils locate being noticably slower at searching the database than
> slocate, but I may be going back to when findutils depended on perl.
>
> I'm going to hate myself for saying this, :) but I'd like to modify
> findutils, & also take on the mlocate spell if Kevin doesn't want to
> persist with it. I'm wondering which is the best way to modify
> findutils:
>
> 1: findutils optionally depends on mlocate.
> 2: findutils optionally doesn't install locate.
>
> I prefer #2 as locate isn't strictly needed, there may be no use for it
> at all on a very small system. Also it 'feels purer', it doesn't
> introduce a dependency only to satisfy expectations. Any comments?
>
> The modification to not install locate is actually quite simple, & goes
> in PRE_BUILD rather than INSTALL. All that's needed is a sed command to
> remove "locate" from the SUBDIRS setting in the makefile.

I see two options, in the order of my preference:

1. Use PROVIDES
Make a separate location spell that only installs locate from  
findutils (same SOURCE) and have it provide LOCATE
Have mlocate (and slocate, if we get it) provide LOCATE
Have findutils optionally depend on locate (systems can exist without it :))

2. Modify mlocate (and slocate, et. al.) to not conflict with findutils.
Leave findutils alone.

-sandalle

-- 
Eric Sandall                     |  Source Mage GNU/Linux Developer
eric at sandall.us PGP: 0xA8EFDD61  |  http://www.sourcemage.org/
http://eric.sandall.us/          |  http://counter.li.org/  #196285



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