In August 1999 Richard Kettlewell proposed a patch to dpkg that made dpkg -R much faster. See: http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=43724
I've been catching up on old mail, and see that the bug #43724, which is a policy change which is associated with that code change to dpkg, was (AFAICT erroneously) closed. Was a change like that proposed by Richard actually made to dpkg ? If not, why not ? IMO it should be. If it was, or will be, then the policy should be changed. I can't seem to find the patch atm but I could probably dig it out and refile the bug reports if it has gotten lost. Please let me know what to do. Thanks, Ian.
