Re: apt-update via patches
On Wed, Nov 21, 2001 at 11:01:49AM +0100, Michael Bramer wrote:
> If you have only some diffs on the server, it is useless (one have some
> day old files, others some weeks old files). And all the diff eat space
> on the servers.
No, it isn't useless. It's less useful than a completely comprehensive
list of diffs certainly but as everyone points out, there is a compromise
with archive size here.
Exactly how many diffs we keep would be something that we'd have to
work out by doing some calculations then tweaking it.
One example of a solution which would give good results for minimal
disk space is to keep diffs between successive packages released within
the last 48 hours (say) and which achieve a compression of >95%. Then
uploads of something like emacs or X which happen in rapid sucession
(because of a missing build-depend or a maintainer script typo) would
not be the PITA the are now.
This example would only be useful to people who did an upgrade every
48 hours at most. But it would also make doing that upgrade a lot
less painful, so more people would do it and hence be helped.
Depending on how much disks pace we decided was worth burning on it it
isn't much of a stretch of imagination to see how you could build some
fairly simple rules which decided which diffs were worth keeping and
would still keep the bloat to something sensible and still get a very
worthwhile decrease in upgrade download size for a good number
of people.
Ben
--
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/// email: bjb@deus.net www: http://www.deus.net/~bjb/
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