[Soc-coordination] Aptitude/DPKG Project Idea

[Chris Baines]

Hello Again,

After thinking more on the subject of speeding up the Debian package
management system, I considered the efficiency of the approach used by
aptitude, at the moment when downloading and installing a large number
of packages, they are all downloaded then installed.

My proposal would involve:
- Allowing aptitude to:
  - When installing a long list of packages, break down the list in to
many groups of unrelated packages
  - Choose the group with the lowest overall download size, and then
begin downloading the packages in this group from the top of the
dependency tree downwards
  - As soon as aptitude has installable packages downloaded, begin
installing them
    - I am not sure about this step, I dont know how exactly how dpkg
handles package installations, it might be quicker to just unpack and
prepare the packages as they are downloaded before actually
installing?
 - Perhaps as an addition to this I would like to also look at
improving the way in which aptitude could use debdelta, possible
looking and testing the integration available in cupt?

Is this feasible as a project application? This kind of supersedes my
debdelta only project idea.

Comments?

Thanks,

Chris