On Sun, Mar 24, 2013 at 07:28:15PM +0100, Lukas Fleischer wrote: > On Sun, Mar 24, 2013 at 11:26:04AM -0700, Anatol Pomozov wrote: > > Hi > > > > On Sun, Mar 24, 2013 at 10:57 AM, Anatol Pomozov > > <[email protected]> wrote: > > > Hi, > > > > > > I am an update junkie. I do "pacman -Suy" several times a day. One > > > thing I do not like with current pacman is that it redownloads whole > > > index file each time I update system. > > > > > > :: Synchronizing package databases... > > > core 104.4 KiB 104K/s 00:01 > > > [######################] 100% > > > extra 1416.9 KiB 171K/s 00:08 > > > [######################] 100% > > > community 1916.6 KiB 204K/s 00:09 > > > [######################] 100% > > > > > > It is 3.5M it total even if only just a few new packages were added. > > > Multiply 3.5M to number of users and you'll get a huge number. IMHO it > > > is waste of bandwidth and user time. From other side index is > > > incremental by it nature. Could pacman use index format that fits > > > incremental updates better? > > > > > > A naive proposal is to use compressed format for "full fetch" (e.g. > > > for users who did not update more than a week), and uncompressed > > > append-only index for incremental. On incremental update client sends > > > request to server "give me append file file starting from position XXX > > > till the end of file", so only delta from the last update will be > > > fetched. Then pacman applies the delta to client index. > > > > > > What do you think about this idea? > > > > Ok, found pacman.conf option "UseDelta" that seems does what I need. > > BTW why it is not enabled by default? Isn't saving bandwidth a good > > thing? > > I'm not sure whether "UseDelta" also affects package lists (rather than > packages only). Arch Linux does not support deltas on the server side > yet, see FS#18590 [1] for details. > > [1] https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/18590
UseDelta only affects packages. It's simply not feasible to create deltas for the sync DBs as they exist today, especially over HTTP/FTP.
