Bug#248037: package-versions is extremly slow

[Petter Reinholdtsen <pere@hungry.com>]

[Joey Hess]
> On second thought, why does package-versions exist at all?

It exists to get a grep-able list of package/version for people
reporting problems with d-i to consult.  I wanted the equivalent of
'dpkg -l'.

> the status file is already easy to read, and can always be processed
> after the fact.

I do not find it easy to read.  At least not to grep in to find what I
want.

> Including the whole status file would be good for working with other
> classes of bugs, as the bugreporter info would include things like
> what packages were confgured, if any failed to configure, etc. This
> seems worth the added space, and gzip is gonna be much faster than
> silly shell code. Replace the whole script with gzip, I say!

No problem for me.  Go ahead if you thing this is a good idea.