There's definitely no way to install packages during a download (see many bugs against the apt framework for the reason behind that). I think it might theoretically be possible to start to download packages as soon as they're selected, though. AFAIK the download framework doesn't care about selection states, so it should be safe to run in parallel with the selector widget. That doesn't help with upgrading packages, but it could be nice when you're trying to install a bunch of new packages.
I'd like to track down the lurking race condition in the background threading stuff (at least, that's my best guess on the recent segfault bugs) before I try something crazy like that, though. Daniel
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