Optimize chocolatey.installed to save time and minion CPU cycles

[marcquark]

I'm using Salt to manage a handful of Windows laptops and i would like for them to periodically apply their highstate when they're powered on. Part of the state includes chocolatey.installed to ensure certain basic software is installed:

install_packages:
  chocolatey.installed:
    - names: 
      - 'package1'
      - 'package2'
      - 'package3'
      - '...'

Currently chocolatey.installed will query the remote repository which takes 3-4 seconds to complete and noticeably consumes the minion's CPU. It does so once for every package in the list, which means it gets worse with every package. "Noticeably" in my case with a total of 8 packages means the laptops' fans spin up for around 30-40 seconds which is rather annoying.

I would like to introduce a small change chocolatey.installed, removing this call to chocolatey.version altogether: https://github.com/saltstack/salt/blob/master/salt/states/chocolatey.py#L124. The necessary information is already present in pre_install and can be reused. There is no need to query the remote repository at all.

I have implemented and tested this change with my minion laptops and can confirm that execution time and CPU usage drop considerably (less than 1s per package, no fans spinning). I would appreciate a bit of guidance on how to properly submit a PR. I've already forked the project and am ready to push the change. How exactly do i go about writing a changelog entry as described in the Dev documentation? I don't have an issue number. Selecting "Feature Request" from the issue creation dialog sends me to the discussions board instead. I don't want to file a bug either since nothing is really broken.

[dafyddj]

I would say that a performance issue that causes noticeable effects on a PC/minion is a bug and should be reported as such.

[marcquark]

#68308