Robert Lemmen wrote:
standard method. you will however find out that the size of all diffs
together is already less than the size of the regular packages file.
Yeah, looking at the average filesize of a diff compared to a packages
file, I guess you'll need to wait like 100-200 days until the sum of the
diffs becomes larger than the package file itself. However, downloading
a 5meg file takes a few seconds on my boxes while downloading the diffs
from 10-20days can take a few minutes, which is not very attractive.
This is quite a dilemma since I understand that the bandwith of
volunteering archive mirrors is not free.
Since the main problem seems to be that downloading many small files can
take much longer than downloading one big file, a compromise could be to
provide only one diff. The trick: generate x diffs for:
today-1day, today-2days .. today-x days
so you only have do download one file if your last update is less than x
days ago.
A good compromise for x could be 50 days or something. The diffs would
be reasonable small, fast to download and if your last update is more
than x days ago you still could download the package file directly.
This solution should keep the bandwidth utilization on the servers small
(older diffs are less likely to be downloaded than the most recent ones)
while being faster than the current (and even faster than downloading
the whole packages) solution.
Plus, you don't have to keep all the old diffs (only the last x ones) on
the servers.
Any ideas?