On Fri, 2007-03-09 at 12:35 -0500, Warren Togami wrote:
2) Ahmed Kamal has been working on a potentially sane implementation of
deltarpm for Fedora's yum. Theoretically, it would work as an optional
yum plugin. If the deltarpm is substantially smaller than an RPM
update, then the deltarpm is provided on a mirror. If the deltarpm is
not provided, then yum downloads the original RPM instead. If it
downloaded a deltarpm, it reconstructs the original RPM and uses GPG to
verify integrity just like yum would verify plain RPM downloads.
Ahmed probably could use some developer and testing help. I've been
encouraging him to be more communicative about his project in order to
get more help, but I haven't seen any further outreach lately.
Warren Togami
wtogami redhat com
I've been working with Ahmed and Michael Schroeder (the upstream
maintainer of deltarpm) to track down some long-standing bugs in
deltarpm, especially as it relates to prelinked binaries. These bugs
were causing very odd problems while working with the yum-deltarpm
plugin.
We *think* we've found them all (the patches are in the latest Rawhide
version of deltarpm in Extras), so I think we're at the point where what
we really need is someone who would be willing to create drpms of all
new packages in Core and Extras (there's a modified version of prunerepo
that does all the work for you), and host them for us.
To give you an idea of the savings we're looking at:
* kdebase-3.5.5-0.4.fc6 => kdebase-3.5.6-0.1.fc6 = 3.5MB vs. 30.2MB
* kdegames-3.5.5-0.1.fc6 => kdegames-3.5.6-0.1.fc6 = 740KB vs. 11.1MB
* OO.o-core-2.0.4-5.5.3 => OO.o-core-2.0.4-5.5.10 = 8.7MB vs. 92.4 MB
There won't be that kind of savings for all the packages, but a general
rule of the thumb is that the bigger the package, the better the chance
that we'll get a good compression ratio on the drpm.