updatedb broken as of findutils 4.8.0-1 due to bigram.exe no longer being provided

[Dan Harkless]

On 8/28/2021 9:15 AM, Dan Harkless wrote:
[...]

Sorry for the Webmail-mangled spacing in that last message. Trying again 
here:

Howdy.  Quick bug to report that I was surprised not to be able to find prior discussion of.  My nightly updatedb job stopped working after 2021-08-03, but I'd been too busy to do much troubleshooting until today.

Looks like it's because in findutils 4.8.0-1, the bigram.exe program is no longer provided, but the /usr/bin/updatedb script (still) depends on it being there:

     [...]
     + for binary in $find $frcode $bigram $code
     + checkbinary /usr/libexec/frcode
     + test -x /usr/libexec/frcode
     + : ok
     + for binary in $find $frcode $bigram $code
     + checkbinary /usr/libexec/bigram
     + test -x /usr/libexec/bigram
     + eval echo 'updatedb needs to be able to execute /usr/libexec/bigram, but cannot.'
     ++ echo updatedb needs to be able to execute /usr/libexec/bigram, but cannot.
     updatedb needs to be able to execute /usr/libexec/bigram, but cannot.
     + exit 1

Reverting to findutils 4.6.0-1 brings back bigram, and updatedb works again. Looking at the 4.6.0 updatedb script, it seems computation of bigrams is an essential step in creating the filename DB (with no bigram man page, I was at first misinterpreting it as "big-ram.exe", rather than "bi-gram.exe").

I thought perhaps bigram.exe had been moved to a different package, buthttps://cygwin.com/cgi-bin2/package-grep.cgi?grep=bigram.exe&arch=x86_64  finds it only in findutils 4.5.12-1 and 4.6.0-1.

I highly depend on the ability to do quick filename greps across all drives, so hopefully the findutils package will be repaired so that updatedb works again.  In the meantime I'll manually keep findutils unupdated on Cygwin32 and Cygwin64 on my various systems.

Thanks, as always, for maintaining the lifeline to UNIX-esque sanity on Windows that is Cygwin!

--
Dan Harkless