[pacman-dev] delta support in libalpm

[Xavier]

On Sat, Nov 8, 2008 at 12:47 AM, Henning Garus
<henning.garus at googlemail.com> wrote:
>
> Delta creation in makepkg seems somehow ok (its already in there after
> all). But what I would really like is a separate tool for delta
> creation, which would allow the separation of building packages and
> creating deltas and setting up a separated delta server. This leaves
> us with options 2 and 3 and I am not really sure, which way to go.
>
>
> looking forward to your comments

Sorry for answering this mail for the 10th time but I have always
different points to discuss.
Now I am very curious about "a separate delta server". What does this
mean exactly?
A different delta database (delta.tar.gz) + corresponding tools to
deal with it (delta-add / delta-remove)?

I am not so happy about adding support in repo-add for several
reasons, I always run into many problems and issues. For example,
deltas are not tied to one particular package version, rather to one
package name. And when we remove or upgrade a package entry, the data
index get lost.

So I liked the idea of a separate delta database. The problem is that
it might lead to a lot of code duplications in pacman if we need to
handle pmdeltadb_t besides pmdb_t. So I am not so happy about that
either.