***BOGO*** Re: Dpkg triggers and user experience, aka "How do I disable those triggers" side effect.

[Colin Watson <cjwatson@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, Jul 03, 2008 at 09:24:32AM +0200, Andreas Tille wrote:
> On Thu, 3 Jul 2008, Lars Wirzenius wrote:
> >to, 2008-07-03 kello 08:24 +0200, Andreas Tille kirjoitti:
> >>/me as a completely uneducated apt / aptitude user thinks: Triggers have
> >>done more harm than good.
> >
> >I haven't been following trigger adoption very much, so I'm ignorant:
> >what harm have triggers done?
> 
> It slows down apt-get / aptitude by calling update-menus / update-mandb
> for every package that drops a file into this directory.

No, this simply isn't a fair characterisation. It calls it at most once
for every dpkg run. However, apt-get typically works like this:

  dpkg --unpack <lots of packages>
  dpkg --configure <lots of packages>
  <repeat>

It performs multiple dpkg runs either to avoid command-line overflow, to
deal with Pre-Depends, or to ensure that Essential packages are
configured immediately. When you're doing any kind of reasonably
substantial upgrade, the number of trigger invocations will be *much*
smaller than the number of packages being upgraded.

Being completely uneducated is fine - we don't expect everyone to be
dpkg gurus! - but it's worth listening to people who *are* educated
before saying things like "triggers have done more harm than good".

Cheers,

-- 
Colin Watson                                       [cjwatson@xxxxxxxxxx]


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