On Sun 18 Jan 2004 2:58 am, Goswin von Brederlow wrote: > Matt Zimmerman <mdz@debian.org> writes: > > On Sun, Jan 18, 2004 at 01:43:30AM -0700, Doug Holland wrote: > > > That's it. One piddly little patch, which most likely affected > > > one line of source code, required me to waste 2.5 hours of dialup > > > bandwidth downloading a .deb file that's almost identical to the > > > one I downloaded yesterday. Am I the only one who finds this > > > irritating? > > > > This all makes sense, except for the "required" part. > > > > > I remember the reason why apt is not currently doing rsync is > > > because it hogs I/O and CPU cycles on the Debian servers. That's > > > a valid reason, but surely there are ways around it. > > > > Surely. First, arrange for all of the packages in Debian to be > > compressed using gzip --rsyncable. Then, find a server with gobs of > > disk, network, I/O and CPU resources, mirror the Debian archive, and run > > an anonymous rsync server. Then, write an rsync method for apt, or use > > rproxy, or whatever. > > > > That is the approximate order in which things would need to happen. It's > > a bit early in the process to be pointing fingers at apt. > > Several people have written rsync method modules for apt > already. Thats not the problem. :) > > > > I suggest that rsync files be precalculated, so rsync downloads > > > don't have to be crunched on the fly. The servers would store > > > .deb files - foo-x.y.z.deb, and they would store the rsync diffs > > > between it and the previous version - foo.x.y.z-1_x.y.z.rsdeb. > > > That way, if the user doing an apt-get upgrade has the previous > > > .deb file in his cache, apt would download the rsync diff file > > > instead of the full .deb, saving loads of bandwidth, and since the > > > rsyncs are precomputed and cached, the servers don't get hosed. > > > > > > Am I totally off base suggesting this? > > > > Yes. It shows that you haven't read the previous discussions that you > > alluded to at the beginning of your message, because they explain why > > this is not a good solution. > > > > Bug #128818 has some starting points. > > MfG > Goswin What about using something like the Debian Diff format, which I found at http://www.tjansen.de/debiff/ ? It checks each file in a .deb archive, and creates a .deb-like file that only includes the changed files between two versions of a .deb. That's a really old web page, and it doesn't mention rsync or cnysr, but it illustrates the general idea.
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