On Tue, 2004-01-27 at 07:13, Axel Thimm wrote:
To get to the topic: There have been some comments on SuSE's way of doing this and why it is not accepted in rpm mainstream at the packaging list, which unfortunatley seems to have died a quite death in May:
http://mail.freestandards.org/pipermail/packaging/2003-March/000214.html
Axel, that's an informative link! My reading of it is that jbj thinks deltas of rpms belongs in the distribution rather than the package manager :-)
He better defines my vague misgivings about the SuSE patch method and presents rsync as a transport method as an alternative (which people here have shot down as being too server intensive).
I think that the xdelta method bridges these two approaches. It is done at build time rather than at download so it doesn't bog down the download server. It creates a valid rpm which is then installed by the package manager so there doesn't need to be a separate install path through rpm.
Reasons it should be discussed on rpm-list: * Rpm could be modified to delta and patch rpms rather than an external tool
Reasons it should be discussed here: * Whether it is used or not is ultimately a distribution policy decision. * Tools besides rpm could benefit from it (yum could download a delta if the base package was available. Would we be able to list this in the common metadata format? etc.)
-Toshio