[pacman-dev] [PATCH] Add deltas to repository database.

[Nathan Jones]

On Sun, Oct 07, 2007 at 08:29:34PM -0500, Dan McGee wrote:
> 1. We probably need a way to remove 'old' deltas. Of course, I don't
> know what to define as old (probably retain no more than 5 deltas or
> something).

I was thinking that it would depend more on the size than the date or
number. Once the combined size of the deltas becomes more than a certain
percentage of the package's size, there is no reason to keep the older
deltas around.

> 2. Although sed magic is cool, there has to be a better way to get to
> that info (pkigname, oldver, etc.)

Maybe deltas could be created as a tarball similarly to packages?

file.delta.tar.gz/.DELTAINFO
file.delta.tar.gz/delta

> 3. Could delta addition be automatic? Right now the entries would be
> deleted every time you upgrade a package in the database (since the
> old entry is removed). Perhaps on an add, we should save the old delta
> entries, copy them over to the new package, and then add any new
> deltas that we find?

I don't know how packages are upgraded (for my small repo, I just delete
the repo file and recreate from scratch), so please correct me if this
won't work.

Instead of passing deltas via the command line, we would add any deltas
that match the package. So 'repo-add repo pan-devel-0.132-2.pkg.tar.gz'
would automatically add any files matching 'pan-devel-*-*_to_*-*.delta'.
The deltas file would be recreated every upgrade.