Request for Comments: updating RPMs using binary deltas

[Lamar Owen]

On Thursday 08 January 2004 10:39 pm, seth vidal wrote:
> On Thu, 2004-01-08 at 20:17, Lamar Owen wrote:
> > When updates exceed 100MB _ALL_ users are low bandwidth, and dialup users
> > are locked completely out.  So they don't update at all, get hacked, and
> > blame Linux.

> I'm going to be a bit of a snob and say the following:

Yes you are being a snob.  Devilish snob at that.

> When the updates exceed 100MB I'm _still_ not a low bandwidth user.

Well, neither am I for that matter, but not everyone has an OC-3 or better 
lighting their glass.

> so if you have foo-1.1-1.i386.rpm on one end and foo-1.2-1.i386.rpm on
> the other end - an rpm-aware rsync would be able to know that foo is one
> package and those files should be diff'd against each other to take the
> bits from  foo-1.1-1.i386.rpm to make foo-1.2-1.i386.rpm

> This would help mirror operators quite a bit. Thereby increasing the
> number of mirrors and hopefully helping out the low bandwidth users by
> there being more mirrors.

So the end user still has to download many megabytes? It's a waste of 
bandwidth.  It's a waste of time.  And there are dialup users.

> > Absolutely.  I would think mirror operators would love to reduce the load
> > on their servers, which this would as I've envisioned it.  And their
> > bandwidth bill might even go down.

> A fair number of the mirror operators don't get bandwidth bills. A lot
> are at universities.

And the universities (of which I am a part) still have to pay their bills for 
that OC-12 or 48 they have, which costs megabucks.  I have numbers; I make 
those sorts of decisions here.

Somebody is footing the bill.

> And the mirror operators I've run into wouldn't
> like a system of hundreds upon hundreds of patches let's say 2 for every
> potential released errata for any package. It would eat up more time on
> rsync and in general be a pain to deal with.

You still do not seem to understand that you would only have to have a single 
patch at any given instant.  You would have the same number of files.  They 
would be smaller.
-- 
Lamar Owen
Director of Information Technology
Pisgah Astronomical Research Institute
1 PARI Drive
Rosman, NC  28772
(828)862-5554
www.pari.edu