Inefficient apt installs

[Steve Greenland <stevegr@debian.org>]

I've noticed before that apt (via dselect) seems to make many more dpkg
runs than are necessary. Last night I finally captured an example. Since
startup is a significant factor in dpkg (at least on my 100Mhz pentium,
not to mention the lame old 386 low use webserver I run at work), this
might be worth looking into. I apologize for whining instead of fixing.

Here's the list of packages -- each line is a separate dpkg startup:

bsdutils
findutils
basefiles
ncurses-base
libstdc++2.9
libc6-dev, libc6
libncurses4
ncurses-bin
kbd, kbd-data, makedev, timezones, dpkg-ftp, locales, doc-base, doc-iana,
        libpam0g-util, libpam0g

A quick look at dependencies doesn't seem to require this
behavior. This was all from slink, btw. apt 0.1.9.

Steve