Re: effectiveness of rsync and apt

[A Mennucc <mennucc1@debian.org>]

hi

I had the same idea some time ago

if you ever decide to work on that, I may help

Goswin von Brederlow wrote:

> I actualy have a little hack how one could implement patch debs now to
> test this out:
> 
> 1. Create an archive mirror with rsync batch files (or xdelta or
> whatever) between the last and current version of each package. It
> might be simplest to replace the data.tar.gz in each deb with the
> rsync batch file and leave the rest of the deb as is.
> 
> 2. Create Packages.gz and friends for those patch debs
> 
> 3. Create an apt method "http-patch" to apt that will first check for
> the old version of the package or dpkg-repack it, then forks the http
> method to download the patch deb, applies the patch and returns the
> build deb.
> 
> 4. Add
> 
> deb http-patch://server/path suite dist
> 
> to sources.list _before_ the normal http url.
> 
> 
> One drawback of this hack would be that you get an error from the
> http-patch method when you don't have the previous version available
> before apt-get falls back to the http url.
> 
> MfG
>         Goswin
> 
>