Bug#89060: please move apt-extracttemplates into apt
> I'm sure this has been hashed out before, but couldn't debconf use
> "dpkg -e"?
debconf used to do something like that, but the overhead of spawning a
dpkg for each package was significant and the apt-extracttemplates
method was conceived to lower this overhead.
excerpt from debconf changelog:
debconf (0.3.60) unstable; urgency=low
* So we (culus, tausq, joeyh) did some benchmarking, and figured out how
to speed up dpkg-preconfigure by about 3x. It turns out most of the
existing overhead was in calls to dpkg-deb, which is slow, and in all
the forking necessary to do said calls, which is also slow. So we moved
the initial package scanning out into a C++ program which links to apt
code and is quite fast. (Sadly, it's also quite big, and has bloated
debconf by 30k and made it arch-dependent.) Anyway, I guess it's worth
it to save a few seconds. <shrug>
it might be worth looking into bod's libapt-pkg-perl package to see if
it's mature enough so we can move this back into debconf if we really
want to fix this problem.... although it really isn't that much smaller
than apt-utils
randolph
--
Debian Developer <tausq@debian.org>
http://www.TauSq.org/
Reply to: