Bug 1374661

Summary:	[RFE] regarding disabling the by default indexing feature of updatedb.
Product:	Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7	Reporter:	Madhur Gupta <madgupta>
Component:	mlocate	Assignee:	Michal Sekletar <msekleta>
Status:	CLOSED WONTFIX	QA Contact:	qe-baseos-daemons
Severity:	low	Docs Contact:
Priority:	unspecified
Version:	7.2	CC:	fsumsal, msekleta, ovasik
Target Milestone:	rc	Keywords:	FastFix, FutureFeature
Target Release:	---
Hardware:	x86_64
OS:	Linux
Whiteboard:
Fixed In Version:		Doc Type:	If docs needed, set a value
Doc Text:		Story Points:	---
Clone Of:		Environment:
Last Closed:	2020-12-15 07:45:38 UTC	Type:	Bug
Regression:	---	Mount Type:	---
Documentation:	---	CRM:
Verified Versions:		Category:	---
oVirt Team:	---	RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
Cloudforms Team:	---	Target Upstream Version:
Bug Depends On:
Bug Blocks:	1298243, 1420851, 1465901, 1549689

Description Madhur Gupta 2016-09-09 11:02:21 UTC

RFE Request by Customer.

- It is regarding disabling the by default indexing feature of updatedb.

- In the /etc/updatedb.conf we have a parameter "PRUNEFS=" in which we define the filesystems and subfilesystems(fuse.sshfs, here referring sshfs as subfilesystem) on which we want to disable the indexing of updated, if I am not wrong.

- Customer wants to disable indexing on all the subfilesystems for by default, for now customer has to manually mention that subfilesystem in the "PRUNEFS=", for the instance: fuse.sshfs or fuse.gvfs.

- Customer has pointed our an upstream patch for this: https://fedorahosted.org/mlocate/ticket/34

I asked for the business justification from the custpomer and below is his response on that:

Thanks Madhur. The business justification is that currently, nearly all
fuse filesystems use a filesystem subtype to indicate what particular type
of filesystem they are. This is an extremely useful feature. However, it
also breaks the filesystem detection logic in updatedb because updatedb
looks for the exact strings in PRUNEFS. This makes the PRUNEFS=fuse
setting in updatedb counter-intuitive and useless.

Making the change would allow updatedb to work as expected out of the box
without needing further tweaking by administrators. This eliminates the
debugging needed when presented by mysterious filesystem traffic, which
originates from updatedb, saving the organization money in terms of
administrator time and lost productivity due to over-burndened
filesystems.

Comment 6 Michal Sekletar 2017-11-08 19:11:16 UTC

I granted this bug devel_ack+ by mistake. I was under the impression that patch mentioned in bug description was already merged upstream and this is just a backport request. However, this is not the case.

I agree with the proposed solution, on the other hand, I think that doing this change in RHEL is risky. Change in default behavior must be first merged upstream.

Comment 12 RHEL Program Management 2020-12-15 07:45:38 UTC

After evaluating this issue, there are no plans to address it further or fix it in an upcoming release.  Therefore, it is being closed.  If plans change such that this issue will be fixed in an upcoming release, then the bug can be reopened.