Binary diffs for deb files

[John Nilsson]

(I accidentally sent this as a private response earlier in this thread,
sorry for the dupe mdz)

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I don't understand why the compressed version of a package is
significant at all.

A good implementation of http transfers will allow cached versions of
compressed packages to save bandwidth, correct? For long term storage
the receiver could take advantage of the fact that the content is
already compressed and just store it as is (maybe LUFS can be used to
make this transparent to the package manager).

In any case, checksums and deltas should be based on the actual content,
not the compressed representation of it.

Maybe it would be possible to have clients sync directly against VCS
repositories, using proxies for compressed cache. mirrors could be
implemented as VCS proxies, couldn't they?

Regards,
John