Re: Request for comments on binary RPM patch packages

[Christof Pintaske <Christof Pintaske sun com>]

Christof Pintaske wrote:

> 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.

of course if you change every single file in a package a patch doesn't 
make sense anymore. However for packages that contain a lot of files 
patching is an issue. And of course you cannot reasonably split 
OpenOffice.org into hundreds of packages just to keep the number of 
files low ...

best regards
Christof