Re: Hints about future improvements
Gabor Fleischer <flocsy@mail.mtesz.hu> writes:
> Hi everyone,
>
> some days ago someone had a question about cutting a package into
> parts. The answer was yes, and one of the reasons: it can decrease
> the downloads which is espetially good if someone has modem...
>
> I was thinking about this, and there's one thing which is not the
> best it could be, I think: Let's see libc, and the packages that
> are compiled from the same source, for example locales.
> I see that libc6 changes so fast, which is good, 'cause it means
> bugfixes are done fastly. But I think locales don't change, and it's
> more than 2 MB. The same about the xfonts-(100|75)dpi. Can we
> figure out a mechanism to solve this?
Its rather difficult to split package into the right amount of
chunks. Each chunk has some overhead for download and state
information (/var/lib/dpcg gets big). I think the idea of bindiffs
would be far more usefull.
For bindiffs there are several ways to do this with deb packages:
1. Actually build bindiffs relative to stable.
2. Patch rsync or similar to download changes.
(rsync should unpack ar, tar and gz files before syncing)
The first approach would mean some load for the server, because for
every upload a bindiff must be generated. I think thats not too bad,
cause many files will be identicall between versions and take hardly
any time (not more than md5sum does). Even diff.debs that contain only
changed files would be much smaller and could be generated real fast.
The second approach would limit the number of servers one could use
and it would mean a lot of load on ALL servers. Every time someone
downloads a package it must be unpacked.
May the Source be with you.
Goswin
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