Decided to upgrade my Ubuntu install (installed using Wubi, which I highly recommend for users from Windows) from 7.04 to 7.10. While 7.10 is still beta, this install is hardly production, so I took the dive and typed update-manager -d at a command prompt.
One thing I noticed is how long the upgrade takes. My upgraded started around 11:30am, and it’s currently 1:41pm.
My theory is that the procedural steps that the upgrade takes to arrive at it’s destination has a lot of intermediate clean up steps for each component that get repeated over and over again. For example, after each new font installed, it completely generates the font cache on the system. If this was done once during the clean-up phase, or after all the fonts had been installed, or even during the next reboot, then approximately 5 minutes of this overly long install could be removed. Oh well, guess I’ll browse the web while waiting…