synaptic reload takes forever

[Brendan Miller]

On Sat, Jun 13, 2009 at 1:30 AM, Vincent
Trouilliez<vincent.trouilliez at modulonet.fr> wrote:
>> Downloading and installing packages works in a reasonable amount of
>> time, but reloading takes at least an hour, and synaptic completely
>> freazes up during that time.
>>
>> Between each convert message there's like a 20 second delay. What they
>> hell is it doing?
>
> I suffer the same problem in 9.04 (never had a problem before, so this
> a massive regression).\

I think your problem is not exactly the same. I have a problem with
apt-get update and synaptic reload taking about an hour on reasonably
fast dsl doing some kind of weird processing and spitting out output
like this:

Convert: esound 0.2.41-5
Convert: expat 2.0.1-4
Convert: fltk1.1 1.1.9-6
Convert: fontconfig 2.6.0-4
Convert: freeglut 2.4.0-6.1
Convert: freetype 2.3.9-5
Convert: fribidi 0.10.9-1
Convert: gcc-3.3 1:3.3.6ds1-18
Error: Binary / source version mismatch, skipping.
Convert: gcc-4.3 4.3.3-11
Error: Binary / source version mismatch, skipping.
Convert: gconf 2.26.2-1
Convert: giflib 4.1.6-6
Convert: glib1.2 1.2.10-19
Convert: glib2.0 2.20.3-1
Convert: gnutls26 2.6.6-1
Convert: gtk+2.0 2.16.2-1
Convert: gtk2-engines 1:2.18.2-1
Error: Binary / source version mismatch, skipping.
Convert: hal 0.5.12~git20090406.46dc48


My cpu isn't being pegged actually... I have no idea why it is taking so long.