Looking at Package Management for Karmic or Karmic+1

[Paul Dufresne]

Someone said:
>One gigantic improvement would be downloading package deltas instead of >whole .DEB files.
I care even more about doing that for apt-get update, than apt-get upgrade.
I am using a bit 56k, and I have seen in last few days that apt-get
update is part of cron.daily now.
I did not deactivated it yet, but I think to do it, because it is a
long process under 56k, and it make things go extremely slow while you
browse.
Better do that when you are away from keyboard.

But it should not be long to download the list of packages updated...
I think this is text files no?
Tools for text diff are there for so long.
You'd have to have many such diff files however...
diff for latest hour, latest 6 hours, latest day, latest 4 days... and
I would stop there.
(If it makes 1 week you did not update, better take the full files).

I can imagine that these diff for .deb could be a pression either on
hard disk space if you save them, either on CPU if you have to
calculate them before sending to the client.
But on the list of packages... for me it make a lot of sense.