ubuntu-standard depends on mlocate -- unneeded, and bad for energy efficiency

[Alexander Jones]

I've noticed that mlocate is doing a lot of disk activity as part of a Cron job, regardless of whether I'm on mains power or on battery.

In either case, it's simply a waste of energy (climate change!) and disk thrashing (shortening disk life) on the Desktop installation.

*Especially* now that we have Tracker for Desktop usage (even if I don't use it myself), mlocate is simply a waste to keep the database updated for 99% of real world (including your grandma) users.

If anyone has any business in a) using CLI tools, b) looking outside their home folder, c) looking at raw file system hierarchy and d) requiring to find a file based on filename alone, they are definitely in an extreme minority and can simply install mlocate.

ProblemType: Bug
Architecture: amd64
Date: Thu Jun 26 14:50:41 2008
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 8.04
NonfreeKernelModules: ath_hal nvidia
Package: ubuntu-standard 1.102
PackageArchitecture: amd64
ProcEnviron:
 PATH=/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/games:/home/username/.local/bin
 LANG=en_GB.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: ubuntu-meta
Uname: Linux 2.6.24-19-generic x86_64

[Matt Neilson (ichthyoboy)]

ubuntu-standard does not depend on mlocate - it is a recommended package. See http://packages.ubuntu.com/hardy/ubuntu-standard

[Alexander Jones (alex-weej)]

This was recently fixed.