updatedb: man page inaccuracies, not usable out of the box

[Tim McDaniel <tmcd at panix dot com>]

I downloaded setup.exe and installed Cygwin yesterday and today.
It's cygwin 1.7.9-1 running on Windows 7 64-bit.  Just like most of
the times I've installed cygwin over the past decade, updatedb doesn't
work out of the box.

I see three inaccuracies in the man page:

       --prunepaths='path1 path2...'
                     Directories to not put in the database, which
                     would otherwise be.  Remove any trailing slashes
                     from the path names, otherwise updatedb won't
                     recognise the paths you want to omit (because it
                     uses them as regular expression patterns).  The
                     environment variable PRUNEPATHS also sets this
                     value.  Default is /tmp /usr/tmp /var/tmp /afs.

The default is actually /tmp /usr/tmp /var/tmp /afs /amd /sfs /proc,
as set via
: ${PRUNEPATHS="/tmp /usr/tmp /var/tmp /afs /amd /sfs /proc"}

       --prunefs='path...'
                     File systems to not put in the database, which
                     would otherwise be.  Note that files are pruned
                     when a file system is reached; any file system
                     mounted under an undesired file system will be
                     ignored.  The environment variable PRUNEFS also
                     sets this value.  Default is nfs NFS proc.

The value is not actually a list of "path...", but rather filesystem
types.

And the default is actually
    nfs NFS proc afs smbfs autofs iso9660 ncpfs coda devpts ftpfs
    devfs mfs sysfs shfs
as set by
: ${PRUNEFS="nfs NFS proc afs smbfs autofs iso9660 ncpfs coda devpts ftpfs devfs mfs sysfs shfs"}

This new job was just like at the last three jobs: the version of
updatedb just out of the box does not appear to finish, and since I
don't change jobs that often, I've forgotten the exact problem, so
each time it takes me upwards of an hour to realize that it's
happening again and debug it.  At each job, they recommend that I "NET
USE" some drives onto my machine, and they have huge directories
and/or are slow to insanely slow, so it would take hours or days to
complete and would hammer the often slow network.  (And when I try to
add things to --prunepaths or --prunefs, I often copy the incomplete
defaults out of the man page and start picking up things that I don't
want, like /proc/registry/..., which seems to be taking forEVER, so
please fix the man pages.)

Going by the default PRUNEFS list, I would say that the general spirit
of updatedb is not to index networked drives.  I therefore ask that
updatedb, by default under Cygwin, not go into networked mapped
drives either.
    find /mnt/z -maxdepth 0 -printf '%p %F\n'
suggests that my mapped drives are file system type netapp.
So I suggest that netapp be appended to the default PRUNEFS, or else
"mount -p" or something be used to determine the current cygdrive
prefix and put it in PRUNEPATHS.

This would probably involve patching what comes from upstream, but the
usability problem hits me bad enough, and perhaps hits others, that I
think it would be reasonable to do it.

--
Tim McDaniel, tmcd@panix.com

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