[Bug 1013583] Re: contents-generation could be 2x faster by not regenerating Packages/Sources

[Adam Conrad]

While ContentsOnly is a neat feature, is there a reason we don't just
generate contents in the main apt-ftparchive run and actually cache it
in the cache DB?  It seems like our current contents-generation does no
caching at all, which could explain why it's so dreadfully slow, even
after it regenerates dists.

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1013583

Title:
  contents-generation could be 2x faster by not regenerating
  Packages/Sources

Status in Launchpad itself:
  Triaged
Status in “apt” package in Ubuntu:
  New

Bug description:
  10:25 <cjwatson> Why does contents-generation generate its own dists/ rather than copying the most recent published version, anyway?  I get why it has a separate dists/, but I don't really see why it has to go to the effort of generating its own.
  10:28 <cjwatson> Oh, maybe it's just hard to get apt-ftparchive not to do so.
  10:29 <wgrant> Because I hate apt-ftparchive.
  10:30 <wgrant> But yeah, it's probably difficult to tell it otherwise.
  10:31 <wgrant> Or was in 2006.
  10:32 <cjwatson> It takes it 100+ minutes to generate all the Packages and Sources again, so avoiding that would be a nice improvement.
  10:33 <cjwatson> Then Contents takes 90 minutes.
  10:33  * cjwatson files a bug.
  10:33 <wgrant> Oh
  10:33 <wgrant> It doesn't preserve?
  10:34 <cjwatson> Not so you'd notice.

  From a brief foray into the code, I think it may indeed still be
  rather difficult to tell 'apt-ftparchive generate' not to update
  Packages/Sources every time.  Worst case, perhaps we can fall back to
  using 'apt-ftparchive contents' manually.

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