Bug#707672: general: binary diffs of large packages

[ant <ant@anthive.com>]

Package: general
Severity: wishlist

Dear Debian,

  At the end of a slow line it would still be nice to be able to download only
the actual binary differences between versions of a package during an upgrade.
Especially for larger packages.

  I'm sure it is possible to do technically, but it may require a very
different approach to packaging.

  For the longer view, yes, the internet is getting faster, but it isn't always
fast for everyone and it is nice to think of it as a limited resource.  If
Debian can make this change then that is many many bytes no longer needing to
be shipped, saving energy and connection times for everyone, disk space, etc.

  Thanks for consideration,



-- System Information:
Debian Release: 7.0
  APT prefers unstable
  APT policy: (500, 'unstable'), (500, 'testing'), (1, 'experimental')
Architecture: i386 (i686)

Kernel: Linux 3.2.0-4-686-pae (SMP w/1 CPU core)
Locale: LANG=en_US.utf8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.utf8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash