[pacman-dev] xdelta diffs & pacman

[Dan McGee]

On 4/13/07, Dale Ogilvie <pnyli0002 at sneakemail.com> wrote:
> 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

This is just a "we aren't ignoring you" email. Aaron and I have been
pretty busy but this does sound pretty interesting.

To be honest, keeping it as an XferCommand script seems to be an
easier way to do it even in the long run- calling programs from C can
get ugly, and sometimes shell scripts are perfectly suited for tasks
like this.

-Dan