Debian's APT 1.1 Accepted Into Unstable

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Debian's APT 1.1 Accepted Into Unstable

It's been over a year and a half since APT 1.0 was released by the Debian development community while today APT 1.1 has reached the unstable community...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Debian-APT-1.1-Unstable

[Imroy]

Does this version have super cow powers?

[deimios]

Did they fix the incessant fsyncs that makes updates 10x as long on BTRFS?

[unixfan2001]

Gee! Why is the community unstable? Is there no way to fix that?

[plonoma]

the syntax of "apt install package.deb" now resolves correctly as well as its dependencies

This sounds like a pretty important feature to get working correctly on the 1.0 version. Why is this only fixed in the 1.1 version?

[cevito]

Did they fix the incessant fsyncs that makes updates 10x as long on BTRFS?

The reason for fsync is to make sure that at all times your system is in a consistent state, such that a power-loss at any point during the upgrade process leaves your system in a bootable state. If you accept the risk that an unexpected hard shutdown may leave your system in a non-bootable configuration you can use eatmydata, which makes the syncs during the upgrade noops i.e.:

sudo apt-get install eatmydata
sudo ln -s /usr/bin/eatmydata /usr/local/bin/apt
sudo ln -s /usr/bin/eatmydata /usr/local/bin/apt-get
sudo ln -s /usr/bin/eatmydata /usr/local/bin/aptitude

Note, that apt cannot simply make use of the rollback feature of btrfs in general: If the user modifies the filesystem him/herself while the upgrade is running, these changes would be rolled back as well in the case of failure.

[mercutio]

Have they fixed the performance yet? Arch Linux's pacman is faster at installing packages than apt-get is at reading package lists before getting started.

[Luke]

I ran into trouble with this on a Debian Unstable system originally converted from Ubuntu. Whole pile of packages it either did not recognize as having been installed or considered broken, while Synaptic still said the system had no broken packages. Rolled APT back to version 1.0.10, and apt-get install -f shows nothing to be done. Not sure how to fix this, if I simply need to wait for something to be debugged, re-do some file in the system or what. I am NOT going to remove and reinstall several GB of packages over this.