On Tue, Mar 01, 2016 at 12:35:16PM +0000, Iain Lane wrote: > This feels like an instance of a general problem: that adding new > IndexTargets from Debian packages is a two step process of installing a > package then updating a second time, so I'm wondering if you have any > idaes about how to fix this more generally? Well, upgrades always were a two-step process in that you have to call 'apt update' and after that 'apt full-upgrade'. Worse, installing tools like apt-file or appstream always was a two-step process of install (and configure) and then data-acquire on first (real) start of the tool. That hasn't changed with the introduction of IndexTargets and I don't see how that should be solved – assuming there is a problem as it isn't exactly uncommon that tools after their installation require a bit of configuration and then go on and download a bunch of extra stuff from the web. If we would be talking about a webbrowser downloading its antitracking/malware list, we wouldn't be talking… The introduction of IndexTargets was meant to avoid (or deprecate) individual (slightly) apt-related tools taking care of their own downloading – which most of them neither did very well nor did they like doing it and either broke with 'obscure' apt features or required explicit additional configuration pretty much duplicating existing apt config (and then there is the problem of different data sources disagreeing as they were managed by different tools and hence in different update states…) That was solved so well (← generous self-praise) that the configuration step disappeared at least for the majority of users. What remains is the need for additional data acquisition on first use. As a user, I would accept that given that its a common pattern. As an advanced user who applied additional config I would actually prefer this style… (I am just imagining how annoyed I would be if apt-file would somehow get the data right after install without giving me a chance to configure it first as I have a bunch of sources and archs I don't want/need Contents for…). But back to topic: In the default install case (and if you really want to) you could package the apt.conf-file separately in a -data package (which presumably would have no dependencies) and install it as part of your bootstrap so it is around at the time apt is first run. Then you just have to run the post-processing (if any) at a later point. Might be that I am too used to all this stuff that I don't see the problem with it anymore… Best regards David Kalnischkies
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