Thanks for your report.

with the possible caveat that this is not intended as a stable API, but more of a best effort

Well, the file format is documented, so probably stable (at least until the documentation changes); though there really is no promise that db.h will not change/rename/be replaced. make install does not install the header file, if you want to, you obviously can but the level of support of that will not be high.

Assuming you're ok with us shipping it, it would be useful if the header file had some more generic include guards than DB_H,

I am tempted to say that if you are patching mlocate enough to install the file, you can also patch the include guards :) Anyway, it is easy enough to rename them now, so https://fedorahosted.org/mlocate/changeset/249 .

I hope you’ll forgive me that I won’t be releasing a new version of mlocate for this, though.

I (and I believe, the bug submitter) understands it's not a supported API as such.

I am tempted to say that if you are patching mlocate enough to install the file, you can also patch the include guards :) Anyway, it is easy enough to rename them now, so https://fedorahosted.org/mlocate/changeset/249 .

This looks just like what I wanted, so I'll pull that into the Debian package. No need to release a new version for this. :-)