Steinar H. Gunderson writes ("Re: Bug#1012619: want
/etc/updatedb/updatedb.conf.d/"):
> On Sat, Jun 11, 2022 at 02:12:50AM +0100, Ian Jackson wrote:
> > How do you suggest I fix #1012617 ?
Sorry for being tetchy.
I still think I need to do better here.
> I don't know how your system works (and there's no documentation that I can
> find), so I'm not in a position to say much about it. (If you use
> filesystem-level snapshots, PRUNE_BIND_MOUNTS would take a fair amount of
> such structures, but I really don't know what you're doing.)
LVM level snapshots. That's not unusual for backup systems.
> But there's
> nothing preventing you from simply documenting that if you are bothered by
> this, you should exclude the relevant directories in updatedb.conf (manually,
> or through something like Puppet).
I don't think "if you are bothered by this" is really right. It's
clearly a bug, and it can cause the backups to actually fail.
How about the following proposal[1]:
* Change updatedb so that it tolerates multiple
PRUNEFS=
PRUNEPATHS=
PRUNENAMES=
and simply concatenates the lists.
* Have it additionally read files in /etc/updatedb/updatedb.conf.d
(or some other similar name), as if their contents had been
included in the main file.
This does not require a big change to the semantics: just allowing
a single list to be specified over multiple lines.
I think this would be enough to meet nearly everyone's needs,
including those of chiark-backup, rsbackup, and, well, whatever else
people might have.
Failing that, I could a send patch to the default file to include
chiark-backup's path, and maintainers/users of other systems with
similar needs could do the same. But that isn't very scaleable, which
is why we usually use the .d convention in Debian.
Thanks,
Ian.
[1] My previous suggestion was under the assumption that the file was
a shell script.
--
Ian Jackson <ijack...@chiark.greenend.org.uk> These opinions are my own.
Pronouns: they/he. If I emailed you from @fyvzl.net or @evade.org.uk,
that is a private address which bypasses my fierce spamfilter.
