Comment 3 for bug 402833

This appears to be caused by the package configuration spending time hitting sid from debian.org, and converting all the packages on its list. This is exacerbated by the fact that sid packages change very frequently.

Specifically, /usr/lib/ia32-archive/bin/apt-update has the following items hard-wired, instead of being written as its own FIXME suggests:
...
# FIXME: use /etc/ia32-libs/sources.list
PACKAGES="$HOMEDIR/dists/sid/*/binary-*/Packages"
URL="http://ftp.debian.org"
REMOTE_DIR="debian"
DIST="sid"
SUITES="main contrib non-free"
SRC_FILTER="$HOMEDIR/conf/sources.filter"
PKG_FILTER="/usr/lib/ia32-libs-tools/packages.list"
LOGDIR="$HOMEDIR/logs"
...

I'd like to suggest (most of) this launchpad bug is not an upstream issue, but one where the Ubuntu package maintainer should/would apply diffs for:
1. Ubuntu.com repos instead of debian.org
2. The Ubuntu dist instead of sid (the increased stability here will save much time)
3. Maintain any changes to the suggested packages listed in sources.filter as needed by Ubuntu
4. Maintain any changes to the suggested packages listed in packages.list as needed by Ubuntu

The notion of where these diffs should be applied, however, can be done by upstream (i.e. writing their FIXME), so that the diffs all exist in the "/etc/ia32-libs/sources.list" instead of "/usr/lib/ia32-archive/bin/apt-update" (i.e. a config file instead of a script).

Also, a dialog warning at preinst could be created, whereby users are warned that the build time is longest at the first install, and asking them if they really want to be using this package if it's going to hang up apt-get update.