Re: I was wondering why fedora has choosen yum over apt-get

[Warren Togami <warren togami com>]

Alexandre Oliva wrote:
> On Feb 10, 2004, Warren Togami <wtogami redhat com> wrote:
>
>
> > Far fewer files are downloaded for headers, meaning more efficient
> > data compression and faster header downloading.
>
>
> Unless I misunderstand, the one gotcha is the common case of a small
> changes in a large repositories requiring the entire set of (single
> file) header information to be downloaded.  This *could* become a
> bandwidth problem, not only for people in the wrong ends of small
> pipes, but also for servers, since rhn-applet would probably keep on
> fetching it over and over (at least every time it changes).

I don't know the details of the new metadata format, but I believe I 
heard Seth talking about there being a single signed file containing 
hashes of the others.  You only need to grab that small file often, the 
others far less often.

Watching my web server logs, surprisingly a higher amount of total 
bandwidth usage is mainly in .hdr files compared to the apt bz2 
compressed metadata.  Roughly 60% of the users using my mirror are apt, 
40% yum.

Warren