Re: Streaming Package Installation for dpkg/APT
On ke, 2011-01-05 at 07:01 +0100, Guillem Jover wrote:
> Something which I guess would speed up the installation process could
> be to just make apt download the packages in self-contained batches,
> which can be unpacked/configured independently. This would also not
> really need any change in dpkg AFAICS. This way the installation
> process could start sooner than having to wait for the whole thing to
> get downloaded. It does not remove the need to store those batched
> packages on disk, but still.
I can't look up the URLs for this, but when I worked for Canonical we
discussed something like this at one UDS, and there should be blueprints
and wiki pages on the Ubuntu sites for this. Some searching should turn
them up.
>From memory, what we came up with was basically what Guillem hints at:
* apt will order its downloads in "installation order"
* whenever apt has a self-contained batch, it will feed them to dpkg
* while dpkg runs, apt will continue to download things in the
background
Further, we discussed the possibility of doing some of the dpkg
installation phases in parallel, even while waiting for the rest of a
batch to be downloaded: for example, unpacking might be possible already
at that time. This is more error prone and more complicated, though.
Related to these discussions we also discussed the possibility of
speeding up downloads by using debdeltas. debdelta seems to work quite
well, and it might be a good idea for Debian to adopt it officially.
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