Re: weekly locate error Was: September 2024 stabilization week

Kyle Evans <kevans@FreeBSD.org> wrote:

> Yes, my proposal is that it stops doing that and we teach updatedb to 
> handle the priv-dropping instead, so that you get the same behavior no 
> matter how you execute it.

Ahhh OK, I get you now. sorry, I musunderstood, I thought you meant the
current "periodic" method runs the filesystem walk as root, but when you
said "if someone really wants to complain that they can't document all
filenames on the system.", i guess you were referring to those who
may call /usr/libexec/locate.updatedb directly as root.

For what it's worth, in addition to the periodic job, I do actually run
a less frequent privileged direct run of
/usr/libexec/locate.updatedb (with the output in a suitably locked
directory!). This proposed change wouldn't be an issue to me, but as a
data point, there may be quite a few others who do so too.

Cheers, Jamie