Package: apt Severity: wishlist Hello there.
It strikes me, while downloading packages with apt on my frozen computers, that not a whole lot of code should have changed in each package -- yet the system downloads the whole silly package again, no matter how trivial the change between versions. It seems that a nice addition would be binary patches, similar to patch(1) (I can't recall the name of a program that I know does this -- I think rsync might be able to be set to use it..) that would give out the differences between the previous version, and the newest version. This way, a one-line change shouldn't lead to downloading the whole thing again. Of course, if due to the package format, even a one-line change makes the package files *very* different, then perhaps the suggestion should just be thrown out. But, if small changes lead to small differences, something like this might be in order. (Perhaps, only for changes between debian-releases of a package -- eg, foo-1.33-1 and foo-1.33-2 would give diffs, but foo-1.33-2 and foo-1.34-1 wouldn't give diffs.) It just seems wasteful to retransmit all that data, over and over and over again. Of course, the whole thing is contingent on the previous version being on the client, so it might not have enough effect to bother with. But, I think the idea should at least be raised. Thanks :) -- Seth Arnold | http://www.willamette.edu/~sarnold/ Hate spam? See http://maps.vix.com/rbl/ for help Hi! I'm a .signature virus! Copy me into your ~/.signature to help me spread!
