Re: Request for comments on binary RPM patch packages

[Christof Pintaske <Christof Pintaske sun com>]

Wichmann, Mats D wrote:

> > We are desperately looking for an upgrade mechanism for OpenOffice.org 
> > 2.x that prevents users from downloading the whole beast again and 
> > again. Therefor I would highly appreciate to have a patch or update 
> > mechanism integrated in rpm. I really enjoy the way SuSE does it and 
> > would like to see that mechanism becoming mainstream.
> >    
>
> I was going to respond to the original by asking "what does suse
> actually do" as they do have a patch mechanism.  It doesn't seem
> to save a whole lot, I'm looking at 9.1 i586 updates and for the
> main package, 58224kb while the patch package is 49728kb - and this 
> is a minor update (build-number change, not minor version change).
>  
Even for 10MB people do care at our openoffice.org installation mailing 
lists. However you can see the StarOffice patch sizes on

   
http://sunsolve.sun.com/pub-cgi/show.pl?target=patches/xprod-StarOffice&nav=pub-patches

compared to the size of the product (approx 120MB) the savings of 
patching are significant. Just for the records: these patches weren't 
for rpm based installations. However for rpm I cannot see how to achieve 
those savings.

best regards
Christof