Looking at Package Management for Karmic or Karmic+1

[Derek Broughton]

Mackenzie Morgan wrote:

> On Wednesday 01 April 2009 3:34:06 pm Derek Broughton wrote:

>> No, he means "install" some packages while others are still downloading. 
>> I can see that being very advantageous to a dial-up user, but I wonder if
>> it can even be possible.
> 
> If you download and install everything that has 0 dependencies first, then
> the ones that depend on those things, and on up the tree, it could be
> doable. Except for cyclical dependencies. For those, you'd need to get
> both downloaded before running dpkg on them.
 
You could well be right - I've never been able to work out, from simple
observation of the output, what the ordering of downloads is (though
clearly it parallelizes downloads from different mirrors), but presumably
it has something to do with the way the dependencies are resolved, so I
suppose at least some of the necessary logic is already there.
-- 
derek