Suppose I have a particular version of a largish compressed archive, most likely a .tgz or .tbz2, and that a remote machine has a newer, and only slightly different, version of the same archive, where most of the content hasn't actually changed much. I might attempt to obtain a copy of the newer archive by first copying my local older copy to the newer name as a file to update from.
My understanding is that a small change in a file before compression can result in a large difference afterwards. If rsync were to do its file stat and content comparisons on the uncompressed copy of both archives, might this not result in less network traffic (sending only the small changes) than just looking at the compressed copies? (Yes, I realize that there are the additional (non-network) expenses of decompressing at both ends, and probably recompressing at the destination.) My particular application is OS installation tarballs, but a number of bloated or huge software products out there have sourceballs where there might also be real savings. Have I chosen the wrong tree to bark up? -- Christopher Vance -- To unsubscribe or change options: http://lists.samba.org/mailman/listinfo/rsync Before posting, read: http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html
