As I haven't received any response, I'm trying with a more evident subject, just in case the mail went unnoticed :-) There is a bug in dhelp (#487722) that makes dhelp wait for hours when upgrading packages that have "a lot" of documentation. That might be just doc-linux-html or similar, or possibly a combination of other packages that together contain many document files registered through doc-base. That means that many people (for some definition of "many") will have to wait for hours if/when they upgrade to Lenny, because of this bug. The proposed fix (not uploaded yet) is to drop indexing documentation on package installation/upgrade. The documentation, then, would only be indexed once a week. It's a suboptimal solution, but the patch is very small and safe, and I don't want to risk going for a better solution (indexing in the background or whatever) if that could mean shipping a broken dhelp. Leaving part of the thread below to give more context... On Tue, Sep 16, 2008 at 02:26:01PM -0700, Ross Boylan wrote: > On Tue, 2008-09-16 at 23:04 +0200, Esteban Manchado Velázquez wrote: > > Cc'ing debian-release, seeking advice... > It would be very interesting to hear what they have to say, and whether > testing has turned up this problem. > > > > Intro for debian-release: this bug makes dhelp wait for potentially > > *hours* when upgrading (many packages). That means that if someone upgrades > > from Etch to Lenny, they will have to wait for a couple of hours for the dhelp > > postinst, while it's asking index++ to reindex all documents for all installed > > packages. > I'm not sure how widespread the problem will be. For example, I have a > lot of linux documentation and standards files installed; maybe people > without that will not have long to wait. > > I just did another upgrade (within testing) that took about 2 hours > because of this problem. > > Ross > > > > This will happen to virtually everyone having dhelp installed if they > > dist-upgrade to Lenny. Or anyone doing any reasonably big upgrade for that > > matter. > > > > -- Esteban Manchado Velázquez <zoso@debian.org>
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