[Aptitude-devel] Bug#312920: writes when nothing should be written

[Manuel A. Fernandez Montecelo]

Control: tags -1 + pending


Hi,

I was working on some improvements that cut the time to initialise
aptitude significantly (roughly to half of the time, in my system, with
the commands given above).

This is in addition to other changes lately that cause aptitude to abort
earlier when there are errors finding packages requested to install (so
the current version is already faster for this specific case than the
versions from years ago).

That should help in other areas where aptitude is reading/writing its
pkgstates file, lazy initialisation of some aspects (e.g. loading
information about "tasks" until/unless they are really needed), and the
recent extra functionality of synchronising its state back to
dpkg/dselect (to play nice with other tools) which made the performance
problem a bit worse.

More work could be done in this area, because improving things by
spending more time is [almost] always possible, but I consider that the
cost/benefit ratio if continuing down this path is not very great,
compared to other things that need to be done, and I think that what was
done addresses the problem as much as is possible in the given time,
without harming other areas or possibly reviving old bugs.

An example of problems that can happen if moving the initialization of
other elements elsewhere is that, if we also defer the initialisation of
debtags (which are needed in the interactive mode, etc), it will cause
small freezes when loading it later, and anyway it is needed for many
command-line commands such as "show".

So marking this bug as pending.


Cheers.
-- 
Manuel A. Fernandez Montecelo <manuel.montezelo at gmail.com>