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Re: Dpkg triggers and user experience, aka "How do I disable those triggers" side effect.



On Fri, Jun 27, 2008 at 10:31:54AM +0200, Franklin PIAT wrote:
> i.e We should be careful not to add lots of new triggers for doing new
> stuffs, that eventually makes the installation to take longer. We can
> still defer actions in the background by other means, like cron.
> 
> I've included some figures for man-db, as an example below (*3). (Thanks
> to Colin Watson who maintain that other feature Joe User will never
> notice).

I understand that this was just an example and that most of the problem
here seems to be in the wording, but, for what it's worth, cron was the
previous mechanism used for this and it really wasn't adequate. My
assessment was (and still is) that the occasional confusion caused to
users by installing a package and then not seeing it show up in
'apropos' immediately is much worse than the small time penalty.

There are probably still some available performance improvements, and
I'll continue working on that kind of thing from time to time with my
upstream hat on.

I expect that most of the new uses of triggers will not be new features
like this one, but instead will consist of moving existing code around
so that it's called only a small number of times during an upgrade
rather than once per affected packages. Thus, even with the odd new
feature, I expect we'll still see a substantial net performance
improvement from triggers.

Cheers,

-- 
Colin Watson                                       [cjwatson@debian.org]


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