[pacman-dev] xdelta diffs & pacman

[Dale Ogilvie]

Hello all,

there seems to be a reasonable amount of favour being expressed for the xdelta 
implementation I have been working on. I set up and utilized a xdelta repo 
hosted on dale77.phraktured.net, running my modified makepkg (pacman 2.9.8) 
to build packages and deltas, and pulling down the deltas to update my 
workstation. The deltas for 17 packages totalled 16Mb, while the size of the 
full packages totalled 225Mb.

I would appreciate it if the pacman devs can provide some guidance as to what 
needs to be done to move this on to the next stage. I personally would like 
to start trying this out with an official package on a real repo. Do the 
pacman devs feel the xdelta implementation is ready for this step?

Currently my implementation can be downloaded as the pacman-xdelta package 
from the http://dale.phraktured.net/delta repo. This package installs the 
makepkg-xdelta & wget-xdelta.sh scripts, which are the package maintainer and 
end-user sides of the system respectively. While I was maintaining the deltas 
on phraktured.net I wrote a short blurb which can be read here:

http://dale.phraktured.net/

I have removed the actual deltas a short while ago, as I am no longer tracking 
package changes. The full stats for my experiment can be found in the forum 
post here:

http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?pid=241997#p241997

I think this system could develop into an improvement for arch in reducing the 
bandwidth costs for individuals and the mirrors.

Regards

Dale