Diff-debs

[Michael Vogt]

On Fri, Jan 13, 2006 at 11:15:46AM +0200, Jonathan Carter wrote:
> Corey Burger wrote:
> > This has been proposed many many times before in debian. There are a
> > few technical challenges that need to be overcome, like which version
> > you diff against, etc. I would recommend you look through the dpkg and
> > debian-devel archives to find the reason why we don't have it right
> > now.
> 
> I looked at the posts that Michael posted, will delve deeper into those
> threads too. For the versioning problems, I think the server can have
> extracted copies of the .debs (disk space is cheap), and the client will
> tell the server which version it currently has, and the server will
> build the debdiff (and keep it for future use) and send it back to the
> client. The client can then build the new .deb file using an old package
> and the debdiff. Am I making any sense? :)

I'm afraid that solution won't work with our mirrors. They won't
install a special sort of server to deliver deb-diffs. 

So whatever solution we come up with, it requres that the mirrors
aren't hit too hard by it (size-wise, amount of additional files,
cpu-wise), that it uses a standard protocol (e.g. http/ftp) and does
scale well (rsync for example hits the server too hard cpu-wise).

The two URLs I posted look to me like the most promising approaches so
far.

Cheers,
 Michael

-- 
Linux is not The Answer. Yes is the answer. Linux is The Question. - Neo