Re: does aptitude really need to lock the status database when downloading?
On Fri, Feb 4, 2011 at 5:10 PM, Simon Chopin
<chopin.simon@googlemail.com> wrote:
[...]
>> > As Julian Taylor mentioned, there is also another side of the same
>> > problem: aptitude itself can be improved so that it is able to
>> > download and unpack in parallel. If it were doing this then the lock
>> > would be justified.
>>
>> As far as I know, apt-get already downloads in parallel. Not sure
>> about aptitude.
>
> I think it does, when on different servers IIRC. But I believe what
> Stanislas mean is to unpack while downloading the rest of the packages.
Ah yeah, indeed, I realized that when I read the sentence again...
> I often wondered why it wasn't the case, but I've assumed so far that
> there was probably a reason I just could not think of :)
I can think one: autoremove and packages marked as automatically
installed. When you install package B as a dependency of A, you
install B as an automatically installed package, so that apt-get
autoremove can get rid of it when A is no longer installed. If you
lock to install package B, then unlock and lock again when you're
about to install A, apt-get autoremove might have been invoked in the
mean time and package B might not be present anymore.
Sure, you can handle that too, but I really don't think it's worth the
hassle. There might be a lot many more cases like this, and the
benefit seems very insignificant.
Anyways, the proper way to request this feature is through the bugtracker.
Regards,
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