RFE: defer font cache regeneration until last font package

[Kimiko Koopman]

Would it be possible for apt-get to defer the regeneration of the font cache
until the last package that needs it is installed?
I have quite a lot of fonts installed on my system. Often, not just one font
package is updated, but several at once. Apt runs fc-cache for each package,
which takes a few minutes every time. Updating would go a lot faster if fc-cache
was run only once, after all the font packages are installed.

[Michael Vogt (mvo)]

Thanks for your bugreport.

making it possible to run certain action (like font generation or ldconfig) at
the end of the install is something that needs to be implemented in dpkg, there
is a proposal about this already here: http://www.dpkg.org/Triggers and a debian
bug:
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=68981

Cheers,
 Michael

[John Leach (johnleach)]

I can confirm this behaviour upgrading from Dapper to Edgy too. I can also confirm that it's annoying :)

[Magnus Hedemark (viridari)]

I'm upgrading a Sun Enterprise 250 from simple LAMP server configuration with "apt-get install ubuntu-desktop". I, too, find it horribly wasteful to see a long delay over and over with "Regenerating fonts cache..." on my console.

Another vote for this to be fixed in future release, please.

[Casey O'Donnell (chibiace)]

I have a similar situation to yonderway. it takes several minutes per regeneration on the machine i am installing xubuntu-desktop onto.

[Anderson (amg1127)]

Ubuntu Intrepid still has this bug...

[Kriston Rehberg (me-kriston)]

This bug is extremely important.
Every single package that involves Defoma or installs a font does a fc-cache regeneration when the package is installed.
Just like ldconfig defers its update until all is completed, please figure out a way to defer fc-cache updates until all is completed.

[Kriston Rehberg (me-kriston)]

Ubuntu Netbook Remix is negatively affected on devices with slow storage, like Acer Aspire One. The repeated, unnecessary fc-cache regeneration on this device causes it to take 60 minutes to install 20 fonts at once.

[RK (kubuntu-rk)]

Considering that triggers are now in place, can this bug be reassigned to e.g. defoma to provide a trigger and to all font packages to use that trigger? Any maybe dpkg be extended to have a state "trigger" where a package is fully configured except for the triggers to be run?

(And additional clones of this bug to other repeated actions, e.g. running lilo, running mktexlsr, ...?)