Comment 7 for bug 742017

Using dpkg-query is of course better in terms of compatibility and I would, usually, prefer it, but this change makes popularity-contest ugly slow. On my P4 3GHz box with about 2500 packages installed it takes about 5 minutes to complette, while previous version with direct file access complettes in 20 seconds.

Many xubuntu/lubuntu boxes have much less CPU power. Despite the fact popcon runs only once a day, I'm afraid many users would prefer not to enable it at all, if it will be so resource hungry. I'd better stick with direct file reading.