[Bug 830492] Re: Downloads should not lock apt

[James Haigh]

Hi Sebastian.

I got progress to refresh on Thursday night. Software Centre works
flawlessly for install and remove, and Update Manager works and shows
progress but is missing details for files. Updating package information
still works the old way, so those downloads still lock but are
relatively small.

"I don't understand why you want to add a custom download tool? Apt
already supports a variety of protocols."

So does Aria2. By using a dedicated download tool we save
reinventing/reimplementing. Package Management in Ubuntu is moving
towards Aptdaemon anyway. By all means add support in Apt, but I can't
help out with that yet as my C is poor.

I'm hoping to add Bittorent support but in any case the BTIH would be
required. It would be ideal if this was supplied along with the MD5,
SHA1 and SHA256 hashes.

Using Aria2 or Deluge, we already have great features like Local Peer
Discovery and DHT. LPD would allow a LAN to download updates only once
rather than the number of Ubuntu machines on the LAN. Out-of-the-box! It
would make many updates and installs a lot quicker, and save data
throughput for both the LAN and Canonical's servers.

I'll look at your branch and I'm also in the process of cleaning up and
preparing my branch. My code is still a bit messy because I'm
inexperienced and new to Aptdaemon/Python-apt.

I'm hoping that these features will make it into Precise. I'm hoping to
save some bandwidth for people, and make updates, installs and removes a
lot quicker and more fluent.

Anyway, it will be a /lot/ harder to use Bittorent if there are no BTIHs
available. Could they be computed on the repo servers along with the
other hashes?

Thank you.

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/830492

Title:
  Downloads should not lock apt

Status in APT:
  Won't Fix
Status in Aptboost:
  Incomplete
Status in Aptdaemon:
  In Progress
Status in The synaptic package manager:
  Won't Fix
Status in “apt” package in Ubuntu:
  Won't Fix
Status in “synaptic” package in Ubuntu:
  Won't Fix

Bug description:
  It should be possible to download while installing, or download 2
  things at once.

  Currently an apt-get command with '--download-only' will lock apt
  (/var/lib/dpkg/lock). Synaptic even locks apt just by being open!

  Examples:
  * I might be updating my system. The update is still in the download stage, and I want to download and install a small package for something. Currently I would have to stop the download, install the package, and resume the download.
  * I'm installing lots of application from the Software Centre. While 1 app is installing the next should be downloading.
  * Run apt-get from command line while browsing software in Synaptic.

  To avoid multiple instances of apt downloading the same file, each
  partial file should have it's own lock (For example,
  /var/cache/apt/archives/partial/inkscape_0.48.1-2ubuntu2_i386.deb
  would have inkscape_0.48.1-2ubuntu2_i386.lock). It may also be
  necessary to prevent updating package lists (sudo apt-get update) when
  any download lock exists as well as apt's main lock.

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