[Mageia-discuss] Suggestions for the ISO

[Luca Berra]

On Wed, Nov 03, 2010 at 08:16:22PM +0100, Olivier Thauvin wrote:
>* andre999 (andr55 at laposte.net) wrote:
>> Donald Stewart a écrit :
>>> On 1 November 2010 10:24, Marc Paré<marc at marcpare.com>  wrote:
>>>    
>>>> Le 2010-11-01 06:00, Philippe DIDIER a écrit :
>>>>      
>>>>      
>>> Using delta rpms would reduce the size of the updates, or has my lack
>>> of understanding of delta roms got in the way?
>>>    
>>
>> Delta rpms, relative to the latest distro release, are long overdue.
>> (And not only in the Mandriva world.  Also for Mozilla, OpenOffice, etc.)
>> Note that for much commercial software, updates are normally delta.
>> Such updates are often erroneously called patches.
>> This may be partly a limitation of rpm packages, or more the programs  
>> that install/update such packages.  If so, it should be a priority to  
>> correct this lack.
>
>The problem of delta rpm is the work need to generated alls delta and
>the space need on mirrors to host everything.
>We must provide delta for each version to the next one:
>
>- main foo-1
>- upd  foo-2 D: 1->2
>       foo-3 D: 2->3 and 1->3 ?
>       foo-4 D: 3->4 and 1->4, 2->4 ?
>
>etc...
>What if delta 1->4 is bigger than the package itself ? and for 2->4 ?

As nanar points out delta rpm is a bad design

a working concept would have been basing all deltas on a specific rpm
(i.e. the one in */release) and bundling entire files. in this case a
patch will grow at most as the original rpm, and you don't care about
keeping incremental diffs.

L.



-- 
Luca Berra -- bluca at vodka.it