On Tue, 6 Mar 2018, Ed Greshko wrote:
On 03/06/18 04:51, Robert P. J. Day wrote:
> just noticed in /etc/updatedb.conf in F27, the snippet:
>
> PRUNEPATHS = "... /udev ..."
>
> not sure if /udev ever existed in fedora, but i think it's safe to
> say, it's not there now and probably won't be any time in the near
> future. and even though it doesn't *hurt* to have extraneous
> directory names in that list, is there any compelling reason to
> keep it there?
>
You probably don't have /net, /var/spool/squid on your system. But
you may know of a package or process that would create them. So,
removing them may cause an issue for you should you make changes to
your system at some point. The same could possibly be said about
/udev.
it's only the mlocate database, i doubt incorrect output is going to
cause any system issues. :-)
Making changes for the sake of making changes is rarely a good idea.
i realize change for the sake of change is not necessarily a good
plan, but i don't recall udev *ever* creating a top-level /udev
directory (maybe i just missed it). i'm also sure that such a
directory would be unsupported by the current incarnation of udev.
i understand there's no actual harm in having extraneous directories
in that list, but various linux vendors tweak packages all the time
for their particular distros. for instance, "man updatedb.conf" on my
fedora 27 system claims:
PRUNEPATHS
A whitespace-separated list of path names of directories which
should not be scanned by updatedb(8). Each path name must be
exactly in the form in which the directory would be reported
by locate(1).
By default, no paths are skipped. <------------ there
and yet, my current /etc/updatedb.conf (which i have never modified to
the best of my knowledge), contains:
PRUNEPATHS = "/afs /media /mnt /net /sfs /tmp /udev /var/cache/ccache
/var/lib/yum/yumdb /var/lib/dnf/yumdb /var/spool/cups
/var/spool/squid /var/tmp /var/lib/ceph"
so it would seem that red hat is already customizing that file in
contrast to what the man page says. just pointing out that red hat is
already making some changes here.
rday