Adam Heath said: > Brainstorming: There could be a bootup script that builds a cache of > some sort, that contains the list of runtime features that are > available. This could be based on the kernel and cpu. apt and dpkg > could then read this cache.
Perhaps at "apt-get update" time? Apt is already doing time-intensive work (unless you are on a _very_ fast link to your mirror), building an on-disk datastructure while parsing the Packages file shouldn't be that much more time. Add in a config option to not automatically update the cache, and a --force-cache-update that the user can run occasionally if they want. IANAdpkgDeveloper, so I might be misunderstanding the problem. --Joe
