[pacman-dev] pacman/xdelta using XferCommand

[Dan McGee]

On 3/25/07, Dale Ogilvie <pnyli0002 at sneakemail.com> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> see my post on the forum
> (http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?pid=238317#p238317)
>
> Any chance that this "low-engineering" approach to implementing an xdelta
> solution could fly for arch, at least in the short term? This solution
> involves:
>
> 1. modified makepkg (see
> http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?pid=235654#p235654)
> 2. packagers having pkgver-1 in the makepkg build dir to create the delta
> 3. end-user implementing XferCommand with a custom xdelta aware script
>
> If this works well for some users, a full c-code solution in pacman could be
> rolled out further down the track.
>
> Thoughts? I see that archlinux.org and the mirrors have been experiencing
> some "bandwidth" issues after the python 2.5 release that perhaps underline
> the need for something like this in arch.
>
> Dale

I agree; the XferCommand solution seems like an excellent way to
prototype this and see if it is feasible. As Aaron and I have alluded
to, we aren't real big on getting this done ourselves, but we will
offer suggestions if asked.

FYI: hopefully the mirroring of archlinux.org will vastly improve in
the next week or so as we clamp down on the 600-some people rsync-ing
from rsync.archlinux.org, of which maybe 50 are legitimate mirrors.

-Dan