[pacman-dev] xdelta support in pacman 3.x

[Roman Kyrylych]

2007/3/15, Dale Ogilvie <pnyli0002 at sneakemail.com>:
> Hello all,
>
> I reckon it would be great to download only diffs for new package versions
> instead of the whole enchilada every time a buffer overflow exploit is fixed
> in kernel26. Building on Thikasabrik's good work on the forum (see
> http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=22872) I have come up with the
> attached patch for makepkg.
>
> FYI, I intend to look further into the pacman side of things next up. I hope I
> can make this thing work... Comments & suggestions are welcome...

Another alternatives to xdelta:

1) bsdiff - smaller patches, slower speed
  http://www.daemonology.net/bsdiff/
  Debian's debdelta switched from xdelta to bsdiff but now looking a compromise
  http://packages.debian.org/unstable/devel/debdelta

2) deltup - nice wrapper for xdelta and includes builtin bdelta support
  http://linux01.gwdg.de/~nlissne/whatisdeltup.html
  http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=77305
  used by Gentoo

3) zsync - rsync-like algorithm but diffs are done by client
its advanced design allows it to be effective on compressed files
(which are packages) too.
  http://zsync.moria.org.uk/
apt-sync and Succinct are based on zsync
  https://wiki.ubuntu.com/apt-sync
  https://wiki.ubuntu.com/PaulSladen/Succinct

I'm currently testing zsync, which doesn't require to store deltas for
each package update.

-- 
Roman Kyrylych (Роман Кирилич)