Description of problem: Could mlocate be updated to use inotify to remove the need for even running updatedb? Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Steps to Reproduce: 1. 2. 3. Actual results: Expected results: Additional info:
Thanks for the suggestion, but inotify isn't really suitable for such global watching. First, inotify doesn't work over network filesystems, so it isn't possible to guarantee instantaneous update in general, and a periodic scan is necessary anyway. Second, inodes of all watched directories have to be kept in memory; on my laptop that would be roughly 16000 inodes, which is about 10 MB of memory wasted for locate; consider a file server with a few terabytes of storage. (To prevent this pinning of kernel memory, inotify has a configurable limit on the number of watches, which is 8192 by default.)