[$] What goes into default Debian?
The venerable locate
file-finding utility has long been available for Linux systems, though its
origins are in the BSD world. It is a generally useful tool, but does have
a cost beyond just the disk space it occupies in the filesystem; there is a
periodic daemon (updatedb)
that runs to keep the file-name database up to date. As a recent
debian-devel discussion shows, though, people have differing ideas of
just how important the tool is—and whether it should be part of the default installation of Debian.