Re: binary patch

[Jonathan Oxer <jon@ivt.com.au>]

On Thu, 2003-11-06 at 10:50, Martin Pitt wrote:

> But isn't rsync supposed to do this? I don't know exactly how
> efficiently it detects and compresses binary differences, but it
> definitely does it and not too bad. With rsync, you get both the easy
> management of complete debs and the bandwidth-saving of binary diffs.
> The only problem is that apt does not support rsync IIRC, but this
> could be solved by separately download the new debs into apt's cache
> with a script using rsync.

Actually IIRC there was some work to make Apt support rsync. Goswin
Brederlow was talking about adding it in Jan 2001. And a lot of mirrors
actually are set up to support rsync.

The problem is that most mirrors are loaded up pretty hard already, and
if everyone started using rsync they'd probably melt.

So it's a tradeoff, bandwidth vs CPU. At the moment CPU seems to be the
factor for mirror admins.

Cheers  :-)

Jonathan Oxer