Re: proposal for a more efficient download process

[Goswin von Brederlow <brederlo@informatik.uni-tuebingen.de>]

Tyler MacDonald <tyler@yi.org> writes:

> 	+1. We've been using bsdiff (http://www.daemonology.net/bsdiff/) at
> work for some internal stuff and it's great.

Oh, and one more thing:

| bsdiff is quite memory-hungry. It requires max(17*n,9*n+m)+O(1)
| bytes of memory, where n is the size of the old file and m is the
| size of the new file. bspatch requires n+m+O(1) bytes.

That is quite unacceptable. We have debs in debian up to 160Mb
(packed) and 580Mb unpacked. That would require 2.7 Gb and nearly 10Gb
ram respectively.

Seems to be quite useless for patching full debs. One would have to
limit it to a file-by-file approach.

MfG
        Goswin