A more efficient up2date service using binary diffs

[Florian La Roche]

On Mon, Mar 14, 2005 at 01:59:07AM +0000, Joe Desbonnet wrote:
> I have more results from my experiments in RPM delta compression. I've posted
> the results so far here: http://www.wombat.ie/software/rpmdc/index.shtml
> 
> Conclusion so far: assuming someone has the distribution RPMs
> available then an entire
> update repository (about 1GB) can be generated from 200MB of files. 
> 
> I hope to post my code once I clean it up a bit (it's implemented in
> Java currently).
> 
> Must check out rdiff also...

I've done tests some time ago that showed a 4.8 factor to reduce bandwidth
needs for RHEL update releases. Big drawback will be the need of the previous
packages, so this might again be only something for a local server to
download updates, but not for normal client machines.
Still the savings look very nice, so I think we should continue looking at
this.

greetings,

Florian La Roche