[ Thanks to Kelly
McNeill for this link. ]
“Ever used the unix ‘locate’ command? It’s a wonderful
thing. Lets you instantaneously search a database of all the files
on your system and quickly find what you’re looking for. Except
that that’s no longer true.“
“Try running ‘locate kppp’ or ‘locate mozilla’. You get hundreds
if not thousands of hits. Now you can get clever with regular
expressions and filter out all the .xpm’s, .html’s and whatnot, and
maybe the list will become manageable. But screwing up ‘locate’ is
just the tip of the iceberg. Ever try to update your Mandrake Linux
system? Something makes it take a very very long time to even
figure out what needs to be replaced. So long that most users would
opt to wipe the system and install from scratch. I’ll bet the sheer
number of files has something to do with this.”
“The unix filesystem is a nice thing, and using it as a pseudo
database can seem elegant indeed. Except that it’s not. It’s slow,
it’s wasteful of space, it makes for backup logs that run on for
miles. It’s just not a good idea.”