Comment 70 for bug 601299

The debian bug you link to did not actually fix this. The debian devs simply dodged the issue by adding a --force-unsafe-io flag to dpkg that slightly reduces ( but nowhere near eliminates ) the ridiculous number of syncs dpkg does. The idea was that debian-installer should use this flag to speed up installations. Not only does it not go nearly far enough during installation, but it does nothing for installing or upgrading packages on an existing system.