clone 585432 -1
reassign -1 apt
retitle -1 apt: source package handling is slow and cumbersome
block 585432 by -1
thanks
On Do, 2010-06-10 at 15:19 +0100, Colin Watson wrote:
> Package: python-apt
> Version: 0.7.94.2
> Severity: normal
>
> I have an application (lp:xdeb) that needs to get source package records
> in order to manipulate them in various ways. Unfortunately:
>
> >>> import apt
> >>> import apt_pkg
> >>> import timeit
> >>> sr = apt_pkg.SourceRecords()
> >>> timer = timeit.Timer('sr.lookup("man-db")', 'from __main__ import sr')
> >>> timer.timeit(1000)
> 28.415705919265747
>
> This interface is really slow, because it has to reparse the text of the
> Sources files over and over again. There doesn't appear to be a better
> way to do this within python-apt. The cache only covers binary package
> records, and the Python bindings for SourceRecords only expose lookup()
> and restart() but not e.g. step(), so there isn't even any way to build
> a cache outside python-apt.
>
> I ended up using 'apt-get --print-uris update' to get a list of Sources
> file names and feeding them through python-debian's parser, but this is
> of course pretty awful, not to mention rather slow in itself - I end up
> with a long delay on startup while the cache builds. (On reflection, I
> could probably use apt_pkg.TagFile, which has a step() method that might
> be faster.)
>
> Ideally, though, I'd like source package records to be more like
> first-class citizens in apt/python-apt rather than feeling a bit like
> afterthoughts, and to have their own cache and wrapper objects so that
> e.g. apt.SourceCache()[src] can return an apt.Package.Source object,
> which might have methods like fetch_source() and
> install_build_dependencies() as well as offering attribute access.
> Would this be at all feasible?
Cloned to APT.
--
Julian Andres Klode - Debian Developer, Ubuntu Member
See http://wiki.debian.org/JulianAndresKlode and http://jak-linux.org/.
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