[pacman-dev] delta support in libalpm

[Henning Garus]

On Sat, Nov 8, 2008 at 1:38 PM, Nagy Gabor <ngaba at bibl.u-szeged.hu> wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> I have been looking through the current delta implementation in
>> libalpm and have put some thought into changing makepkg/repo-add to
>> support delta creation. However, I'm running into some problems,
>> mostly due to md5sums and gzip.
>>
>> The current implementation works as follows. On a sync operation it is
>> checked, whether a valid delta path exists and if the summed filesize
>> of the deltas is smaller than the filesize of the whole download. When
>> this is the case the deltas are downloaded and applied to the old
>> file. After that the patched file is treated as if it was downloaded
>> normally, this includes a check of the md5sum. Gzip files have a
>> header, that has a timestamp, which will screw with this md5sum. When
>> a patch is applied to a gzipped file by xdelta, xdelta will unzip the
>> file, apply the patch and then rezip the file. The author of xdelta
>> was obviously aware of the problems with the timestamp, because he
>> decided to leave it empty. The same can be achieved by the -n option
>> of gzip. But there comes the next problem, xdelta uses zlib for
>> compression, gzip implements compression itself. And files created by
>> gzip can differ from files created by zlib. Bsdtar uses zlib as well,
>> but writes the timestamp and there is no option to prevent this (at
>> least none that I can see).
>
> First of all, our current delta implementation doesn't work at all atm, see
>        FS#12000. So any maintainer are welcome ;-)
>

I have yet to test this, but I think this comes down to repo-add not being in
line with the current implementation, as you already pointed out in
the discussion.


>> 2. create the package, but don't compress it with bsdtar, use gzip -n
>> instead. This means we have to use gzip again, in libalpm, when we
>> apply the delta.
>>
>> Seems better than 1, but makes makepkg and libalpm rely on gzip. Not
>> sure if this is a good thing, especially for libalpm.
>
> maybe. But I don't see why we should use gzip in libalpm. Iirc we never
> compress things in alpm.
>

Yes you do. libalpm uses system() to execute:
xdelta patch [deltafile] [oldpkg] [newpkg]

xdelta will unzip the old package, apply the patch and rezip the new package.
Due to the zlib/gzip inconsistencies the md5sum for the patched
package can differ from the md5sum of the new package, which was
zipped with gzip. Unless that line is changed to something like
xdelta patch -0 [deltafile] [oldpkg] - | gzip -cn > [newpkg]