Bug#128818: [patch] packages.gz diff support for apt
On Sun, 28 Nov 2004, Anthony Towns wrote:
> Yeah -- but it's only 17MB a day in total; so big deal. And I suspect
> gzip --rsyncable wouldn't make it that much bigger either anyway. It's
> the client side implementation issues that's really tricky.
>
> Hrm. How about two files; an index and a single concatenated patch file,
> where the index tells you where to start and where to finish, and you
> just download those bytes, and apply them? Can apt methods reliably be
> made to support one of "download bytes 1..N of <url>" or "download bytes
> M..EOF of <url>"? I guess we can trust that ./Packages.diffdex.gz and
> ./Packages.diff.gz will all be in sync pretty much all the time on
> non-broken mirrors. :-/ One file, or an index and n files would be
> easier to make reliable.
Only http can do ranges. FTP can only start at an offset; the client then has
to abort when it gets what it wants, by closing the tcp connection.
I'm not certain about the rsh/ssh method.
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