Diff-debs

[Phillip Susi]

The problem with that is that the clients usually no longer have the old
package, it has long since been purged from their apt cache.  For a
system like this to work it would have to contain diffs between the
files inside the package, not the package itself, and the client would
have to grab the binaries installed on their system and apply the xdelta
to them.

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? :)
> 
> -Jonathan
>