[pacman-dev] delta support in libalpm

[Allan McRae]

Xavier wrote:
> 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

Would it be useful if I put xdelta3 into the repos to help testing 
things out for this?

Allan