Hi. As probably one of the more bandwidth constrained DDs, I wanted to weigh in on this bug. My home internet connection has been a dialup modem for about half of the past decade+. I work at home, too. When not on dialup, I have spent time on satellite internet connections. I have spent a bit of time in Australia. I've spent time on a variety of flakey and not so flakey conference etc wifi. I've also spent plenty of time on fast fiber connections in a variety of first world countries. If pdiffs are going to help anyone, it seems they should help me. And they probably have, once or twice. If I was just out the other day and did an apt get update, I can pdiff my way to a new update in only half an hour or so. But this is entirely outweighed by the times they have massively slowed down updates when I do have bandwidth available to burn. And if I have not updated in several days, and am behind dialup, pdiffs may save some time, but the overall bandwdidth is still too much to bother updating (let alone upgrading), in most cases. I recommend that apt disable pdiffs by default, or at least limit them to a max of 4 or some other number. It could do several things to make things better for dialup users: * Add a simple flag to enable pdiffs. -c Acquire:Pdiffs=true ... I probably mistyped that, it's too long for casual use. * Add some kind of profile support, so I can tell apt when it'm in a bandwidth constrained environment. * Provide a way to apt-get update only the security.debian.org line from sources.list, for example. So if there's a security fix I want, I don't have to comment out all the other lines to quickly update it. (Which tends to nuke the cache, so I end up re-downloading all the Packages lists later.) -- see shy jo
Attachment:
signature.asc
Description: Digital signature