does aptitude really need to lock the status database when downloading?

[Stanislav Maslovski <stanislav.maslovski@gmail.com>]

Hi debian-devel,

I wanted to ask this for quite a long time: Does aptitude (I think
apt-get does the same) really have to lock "the status database area"
when _downloading_ packages?

For example, I am running an update on a slow connection and want to
uninstall or install with dpkg a few packages while the others are
being downloaded. Should not this be possible? I understand that there
can be a situation that a dependency could be affected by such an
action, but is not it easy to check for this right before unpacking?

-- 
Stanislav