[RFC] Filesystem-local databases in mlocate

[Miloslav Trmac]

Hello,
Bernardo Innocenti napsal(a):
>> Can anyone see a problem with the plan, or an important feature that the
>> above fails to address?
> I love your proposal, but I'm concerned with littering the roots of
> all mountpoints with .mlocate and possibily 10 other dot files from
> other applications.
> 
> I hope that you and the authors of other system services with
> similar requirements could get together and come up with a standard
> place for these files named .volume/, .info/, .db/ or something
> similar.  Subsystems that may want to use it include full-text
> search engines, quota, etc.
Using a service-specific directory is slightly more secure: accessing
files within the .mlocate directory is allowed only to root and the
slocate user, so the risk of exploiting some other application and using
the privileges to attack mlocate data files is smaller.

> Maybe the LSB would care to publish a standard within the next
> 10 years?
It seems most successful standards codify existing practice, so there
must be some practical applications first.

Anyway, I'll make sure to make the mlocate database format not depend on
the specific .mlocate/mlocate.db suffix.
	Mirek