Wily Werewolf was released yesterday and with it many new things out of the box.
My favorite feature is something that is silly, simple, a tiny patch, and speeds up something I do often.
I work in the cloud and that means I am deploying new machine images many times a day. Anything to speed this up is something that I want.
In Wily, add-apt-repository now has a -u switch.
-u, –update Update package cache after adding
You’ll notice everywhere on the internet where add-apt-repository is used, the next line of instructions is `apt-get update`. This refreshes the package cache for ALL of the configured apt repositories. On a slow machine with slow IO or slow network, this can take more than just a few seconds, possibly a minute or two. This is too long to wait.
The -u option solves this problem. Not only does is remove the need to `apt-get update` by automatically doing it, but it only fetches the package cache for that newly added repository saving much time.
So anywhere on ask.ubuntu.com or wiki.ubuntu.com where you see:
sudo add-apt-repository FOO
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install BAR
add the -u and remove the update command:
sudo add-apt-repository -u FOO
sudo apt-get install BAR
Revel in the time you save.