A more efficient up2date service using binary diffs

[Joe Desbonnet]

 From what I can tell nobody is interested in implementing a rpm.diff 
system right now (please correct me if I am wrong).

One of the problems raised in earlier threads is that the RPMs need to 
be available on the updating computer to apply the patches to.

It is feasible -- if such a system can be demonstrated to work -- to 
have the option at install time to keep the RPMs of installed packages 
on disk? Sure, there is a disk space penalty -- but for a dialup user 
the bandwidth savings would make up for that. Even with my 512Kbps DSL 
line I find the OpenOffice upgrades burdensome.

Also having the signed RPMs on disk may have other uses: eg verify the 
integrity of an installation (compare files with those in the RPM). 
Fix/refresh installation.. etc.

Joe.


On 03 Mar 2005 16:33:56 -0300, Alexandre Oliva <aoliva at redhat.com> wrote:
 > On Mar  3, 2005, Joe Desbonnet <joe at galway.net> wrote:
 >
 > > Has anyone thought about improving the up2date service by offering
 > > diff files in addition to the .rpm files?
 >
 > Yup, see mail thread in this very last by the end of January last
 > year, and many others :-)
 >
 > --
 > Alexandre Oliva             http://www.ic.unicamp.br/~oliva/
 > Red Hat Compiler Engineer   aoliva@{redhat.com, gcc.gnu.org}
 > Free Software Evangelist  oliva@{lsd.ic.unicamp.br, gnu.org}
 >