yum-presto - fast updates for Fedora 7

[Tim]

On Wed, 2007-04-04 at 09:56 -0700, RavenOak wrote:
> What about server-side?  Either the server or the client needs to do a
> binary/rpm diff.  If it's the client, that really doesn't cut down on
> bandwidth because the client would have to d/l the new package to diff
> it against the old one (and if it didn't have the old one, d/l it
> too).  

One would imagine that the server has a full installation package for
something like OpenOffice.org (as an example), then a series of small
difference update files since the original was provided.  Users would be
expected to install updates as they came out, one at a time.  Users that
didn't do so, would probably have to install them all.  Unless it was
that the last one didn't need prior ones (I suppose they could list
prior ones as dependencies).  Otherwise each one would be bigger than
the last, as they incorporated all the changes since the original.

But either way, getting five several kilobyte files to update something
is a lot smaller than several megabytes of the installation package,
when all that changed was a few library files in the package, or a few
bytes inside some files.

It always struck me as very inefficient the updating process on Red Hat,
then Fedora.  Back in my Amiga days, an update to a program might be one
or two 30kB files, and those files were all that you downloaded and
copied into the program's directory.  I would have thought that you'd
have program-1.1.rpm plus program-1.1-updates.rpm packages (or that
style of thing).

-- 
(This box runs FC6, my others run FC4 & FC5, in case that's
 important to the thread.)

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