Debian / Ubuntu package taking hours to update on SSD

[wvengen]

I'm really happy that the Heroku CLI is packaged as a deb package, so it can be installed system-wide and upgraded as part of system updates. But when upgrading the heroku package on my MacBook Pro 11,2 with SSD storage (APPLE SSD SM0512F, UXM2JA1Q), it literally can take hours, bringing IO performance down (now and then even to an unusable state).

This is probably because the number of files in the package is >20k (dpkg -L heroku | wc -l says 20938). I don't think there are many packages with this many files (on my system linux-headers has 17k, atom 9k, adwaita-icon-theme-full 5k, evince-common 3k).

Looking at the files, I find 4k typescript files, 0.5k readmes/licenses, travis configs, bundled and source files of node modules, etc. I do think many of those are not actually required.

So my request is: can the number of files please be reduced? By removing unnecessary files, by using system packages for node modules (but I guess that's a lot of work), or combine all the files in a single Javascript file. The last should be relatively easy, I suppose.