On Fri, 27 Apr 2001, Jean Charles wrote: > wouldn't it be great if you could just download what has changed > on some package ? for exemple > > the maintainer changes something in /etc/init.d/sendmail and you > have to download 1mo . > with rsync you would just download the part that changed ...
Filenames have changed between versions. Files are compressed. If the data is stored in extracted form, or stored in small, diff chunks, then there is a disk space hit on the server, plus additional bw usage. If a special program is run on the server, to do rsync diff calculation, then there is a big cpu hit, not to mention having to run this special server.