Comment 5 for bug 506219

OK, I've got it, almost. Can someone comment here before I take this back to Gnome? I've already made two small errors in posts over there--once omitting a "not" that makes it look like not a bug--and I don't want to look like a fool and jeopardize this bug. And it is a bug, although I'm afraid someone will declare it a feature.

gconf-editor has a field "quick_search_second_scan_excluded_paths that is supposed to exclude the path from "locate", but it doesn't seem to be working right. By default "/" is excluded. Actually, this excludes all the subdirectories, not just root. But "/etc", "/etc/", and "/etc/*" do not exclude the /etc directory. Is this not an outright bug?

Whatever the syntax, it seems to me that excluding part of the drive by default is (1) contrary to the documentation (unless you count some weasel words in the fine print near the bottom), and (2) unhelpful.

Sorry, I reopened the bug for comments. Feel free to triage it again.