apt-get update

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Mon, Aug 28, 2006 at 12:47:16PM -0400, Merv Curley wrote:
> Sorry Giles, you missed my question.  When one does an 'apt-get update'  the 
> data that comes in must go to a file somewhere. In /var/cache/apt/ or ?.  
> Else how could you use that data for a week or two or 6?   I want to be able 
> to tell my pal in Japan where to look to see if that file is there.  

/var/lib/apt/lists/

> When I do an 'update' and then do it a second time shortly after,  my second 
> one takes almost no time since there is nothing to change, I guess.  At 2 
> Kb/s or less, it takes him an hour to do the update and would take equally 
> long to try to install even a small program.  When he did the update last 
> time and it apparently disappeared, he did it again the next day.  It took an 
> hour again, I would have thought there were very few things to change and 
> would take just minutes.
> 
> An upgrade is out of the question, he only gets 4 hours a month for many many 
> yen.  He would like to able to be able to see how many dependencies there are 
> for an install,  something that adept and kpackage etc will tell him.

Well fortunately etch and future debian's now transfer diff's rather
than the complete Packages file, which makes apt-get update run much
faster for most people after getting the whole file the first time.
Should help a lot in general.  Sarge and older transfer the whole
Packages file every time it changes (but only when it has changed).

--
Len Sorensen
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