What next?

[Tarjei Knapstad]

On Thu, 2005-06-02 at 00:24, Mike Hearn wrote:
> On Wed, 01 Jun 2005 16:31:46 -0400, seth vidal wrote:
> > > Bandwidth friendly yum using binary delta algs.
> > > 
> > 
> > HAHAHAHAHAH
> > no. :)
> 
> Why not? SUSE do this, I think.
> 

Initially I don't see any humongous hurdles here either, but others have
investigated this a lot more than I have and come to rather different
conclusions :) See this post from Warren for instance from a thread
January last year:

http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2004-January/msg01494.html

The start of that thread contains some proof of concept scripts that
seems to have passed initial testing, but I'm not sure where it all
ended...? One consideration would be extra server space. Unless a common
"RPM diff/patch API" is developed that can be employed by yum, up2date,
apt etc. then you'll need to provide both the binary patches and the
full updated RPM's which I guess would roughly double the serverspace
needed. I think you would also need more local space, i.e. wouldn't
every RPM that comes with the distribution need to be available so that
they can be copied and patched with updates? 

In any case, you're right about SuSE - they've done it for quite some
time I think, but I have no idea how they've implemented it.

To sum up my feelings:
Initial thought: That would be great!
Second thought: That would probably be nice.
Upon further investigation: I have no idea really, but Seth, Warren and
others seem to have deemed it not feasible or at least hard to pull off
successfully.

Regards,
--
Tarjei