To avoid Canonical IS (or, indeed, anyone else running Debian/Ubuntu archives on Lucid) having to constantly maintain and merge their own version of apt, we should just officially backport the apt-ftparchive code that's been in use and tested in the Canonical DC for months.
In the interest of not introducing any possible new regressions, I've taken the exact code used in the DC (which matches exactly with mvo's PPA as well, for simpler review), and applied those patches to the most recent security upload. This package will be uploaded as soon as LP gives me a bug number to reference in the changelog.
[Impact]
For the Ubuntu archive, this is a must-have feature (we'll continue to roll our own packages if we have to, but that's less testing for what we run, and others may like to use it as well)
[Development Fix]
These patches were backported in July, and I can't say exactly when they originally went in, but it's obviously fixed in current versions.
[Regression Potential]
As noted, these backports have been heavily tested in the Canonical datacentre on some of the largest (and weirdest?) apt-ftparchive scenarios in the world. I'm confident it won't break for people using the new feature, and even moreso that it will cause no problems for people who choose not to use it (or people who don't use apt-ftparchive at all, which is 99% of users)
Hello Adam, or anyone else affected,
Accepted apt into lucid-proposed, the package will build now and be available in a few hours. Please test and give feedback here. See https:/