On Fri, 5 Jan 2001 19:08:38 +0200 [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Sami Haahtinen) wrote:
> Or, can rsync sync binary files? > hmm.. this sounds like something worth implementing.. rsync can, but the problem is with a compressed stream if you insert or alter data early on in the stream, the data after that change is radically different. But... you could use it successfully against the .tar files inside the .deb, which are normally compressed. This would probably require some special implementation of rsync, or to have the uncompressed packages on the server and put the magic in apt. Or perhaps the program "apt-mirror" is called for, which talks its own protocol to other copies of itself, and will do a magic job of selectively updating mirror copies of the debian archive using the rsync algorithm. This would be similar to the apt-get and apt-move pair, but actually sticking it into a directory structure that looks like the debian mirror. Then, if you want to enable it, turn on the server version and share your mirror with your friends inside your corporate network! Or an authenticated version, so that a person with their own permanent internet connection could share their archive with a handful of friends - having an entire mirror would be too costly for them. I think this has some potential to be quite useful and reduce bandwidth requirements. It could use GPG signatures to check that nothing funny is going on, too. Either that or keep a number of patch files or .xd files for a couple of old revs per packages against the uncompressed contents of packages to allow small changes to packages to be quick. Or perhaps implement this as patch packages, which are a special .deb that only contain the changed files and upgrade the package. -- Sam Vilain, [EMAIL PROTECTED] WWW: http://sam.vilain.net/ GPG public key: http://sam.vilain.net/sam.asc
