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The file name databases contain lists of files that were in particular
directory trees when the databases were last updated. The file name
database format changed starting with GNU locate version 4.0 to
allow machines with different byte orderings to share the databases.
GNU locate can read both the old and new database formats.
However, old versions of locate (on other Unix systems, or GNU
locate before version 4.0) produce incorrect results if run
against a database in something other than the old format.
Support for the old database format will eventually be discontinued,
first in updatedb and later in locate.
If you run ‘locate --statistics’, the resulting summary indicates
the type of each locate database. You select which database
format updatedb will use with the ‘--dbformat’ option.