Postpone

I just finished implementing postpone, a wrapper that is intended to take an arbitrary command, fork into the background, wait until some lockfile is freed, and then run the command. Of course the idea is that the lockfile is /var/lib/dpkg/lock, and that postpone is used in maintainer scripts. (Update-menus already does that, and I’ve basically grabbed that code and generalized it as a separate program.)

As a test implementation, I modified the post{inst,rm} templates in the tex-common package and rebuilt texlive-lang-* using that. dpkg -i texlive-lang-*.deb takes over 4 minutes in the old version, but only a total of 60s with postpone used (35s for dpkg -i plus 25s for the background jobs).

A Debian package is currently sitting in NEW, let’s hope it will actually get used in maintainer scripts.

• Debian