Diff-debs

[John Nilsson]

On Fri, 2006-01-13 at 10:13 -0500, Phillip Susi wrote:
> 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.

Here's a novel approach, (I'm just dreaming this up). A p2p rsync
(zsync?) network where clients can sync against each other.

1. Determine which packages have updates. you <-> mirror
2. Find a few peers with upgraded packages. you <-> p2p network
3. zsync modified files with peer(s) you <-> peer
(3.a if possible, bittorrent distribution?)
4. verify md5susm you <-> mirror

Regards,
John