[pacman-dev] delta support in libalpm

[Henning Garus]

On Mon, Nov 10, 2008 at 8:38 AM, Allan McRae <allan at archlinux.org> wrote:
> Henning Garus wrote:
>> 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]
>
> Is any of this fixed by using the xdelta3 branch?  From memory that does not
> use gzip/bzip2.

According to http://xdelta.org/xdelta3.html xdelta3 uses a builtin
compression to compress the delta files (xdelta1 uses zlib). However,
you won't get around decompression and recompression when using deltas
with compressed files. When xdelta3 gets compressed files as input it
will use the appropriate external compression engine to decompress the
inputs and compute a delta. It do that again to compress the output
after patching. So basically it will do the same, as my original
proposal 2, only internally. It could be interesting nonetheless,
because with xdelta3 deltas would probably work for bzip2 compressed
packages, without any further changes in pacman.

  Henning