On Wed, Nov 03, 2010 at 08:16:22PM +0100, Olivier Thauvin wrote:
* andre999 ([email protected]) wrote:
Donald Stewart a écrit :
On 1 November 2010 10:24, Marc Paré<[email protected]> wrote:
Le 2010-11-01 06:00, Philippe DIDIER a écrit :
Using delta rpms would reduce the size of the updates, or has my lack
of understanding of delta roms got in the way?
Delta rpms, relative to the latest distro release, are long overdue.
(And not only in the Mandriva world. Also for Mozilla, OpenOffice, etc.)
Note that for much commercial software, updates are normally delta.
Such updates are often erroneously called patches.
This may be partly a limitation of rpm packages, or more the programs
that install/update such packages. If so, it should be a priority to
correct this lack.
The problem of delta rpm is the work need to generated alls delta and
the space need on mirrors to host everything.
We must provide delta for each version to the next one:
- main foo-1
- upd foo-2 D: 1->2
foo-3 D: 2->3 and 1->3 ?
foo-4 D: 3->4 and 1->4, 2->4 ?
etc...
What if delta 1->4 is bigger than the package itself ? and for 2->4 ?
As nanar points out delta rpm is a bad design
a working concept would have been basing all deltas on a specific rpm
(i.e. the one in */release) and bundling entire files. in this case a
patch will grow at most as the original rpm, and you don't care about
keeping incremental diffs.
L.
--
Luca Berra -- [email protected]
