Xavier wrote:

So probably this makes the result a bit wrong...

a minor repackaging change ... without causing a big download for every user.

I wouldn't consider this as a skew in the statistics for that exact reason. There are users who downloaded 29MB of updates for a (possibly) one-line change. __________ Brendan Hide

On Fri, Mar 6, 2009 at 3:38 PM, Nagy Gabor wrote:

Well, these results are cool. If deltas finally work perfectly in alpm we may want to factorize (move) it to a stand-alone xdelta client-server(?) stuff, which is something similar to rsync (but we need a vcs-like stuff here). Well, I know this idea is very ambitious, but I have the impression that we (== Nathan and Xavier:) did something, from which the whole open source community could profit. (Moreover, our alpm code would be cleaner :) At least I didn't find anything which is similar to our low-bandwidth delta-based "vcs system" on the net.

There would be a huge drawback with this idea, that we couldn't simply re-use all the existing http/ftp mirrors. However, I considered writing standalone apps in python : 1) delta-add.py : analog of repo-add but for delta. delta-add delta-database foo1.delta foo2.delta ... 2) delta-download.py : have a delta.conf file, analog to pacman.conf, to specify delta mirrors delta-download url : either use deltas from the delta mirrors to generate the wanted package, or download the url directly I was motivated by this solution, when I realized that the repository system implemented by pacman is quite nice : * pacman.conf specifying for each repo multiple possible urls (mirroring system) * refresh only when needed using .lastupdate So that I would have to reimplement / duplicate this system. Also by moving this to an external app, it means the refreshing of the database has to be made for each download (for each download, the external client app has to be called). So I lost my motivation and this project didn't go far.

Nagy Gabor wrote:

... factorize (move) it to a stand-alone xdelta client-server(?) ... P.S: This is of course an utopian idea. :) I'd like to try convince the powers-that-be here to sponsor a server in Atlanta.

Who would I need to speak to to get some real statistics on the project's resource requirements so I can put together a proper proposal? __________ Brendan Hide