On Sun, 28 Nov 2004, Anthony Towns wrote: > Yeah -- but it's only 17MB a day in total; so big deal. And I suspect > gzip --rsyncable wouldn't make it that much bigger either anyway. It's > the client side implementation issues that's really tricky. > > Hrm. How about two files; an index and a single concatenated patch file, > where the index tells you where to start and where to finish, and you > just download those bytes, and apply them? Can apt methods reliably be > made to support one of "download bytes 1..N of <url>" or "download bytes > M..EOF of <url>"? I guess we can trust that ./Packages.diffdex.gz and > ./Packages.diff.gz will all be in sync pretty much all the time on > non-broken mirrors. :-/ One file, or an index and n files would be > easier to make reliable.
Only http can do ranges. FTP can only start at an offset; the client then has to abort when it gets what it wants, by closing the tcp connection. I'm not certain about the rsh/ssh method.
