Hi, I'd like to add my +1 to this. On a Raspberry Pi 1 running Debian trixie, apt-get update with only "Hit" lines still takes about 35 seconds, all of it in "Reading package lists". The main armhf Packages file is 80 MB, and pkgcache.bin (43 MB) gets rewritten on every run even though nothing changed (mtime went from 07:24:54 to 07:26:54 across a single all-Hit update).
Skipping that step when nothing was downloaded would make a big difference on slow hardware like this. Thanks!
