On Mon, 2006-04-10 at 23:24 +1000, David Timms wrote:
I haven't tried this but I thought I might: from my reading of
the rsync
protocol, it can efficiently sync two identically named files, even when
the data moves around within the file. This is done by taking a rolling
hash and comparing at each end.
An rpm update for say FC5, would be very likely to have very small
changes - ie bug fixes, but since compiles would otherwise be the same I
imagine it would be a good candidate for efficient rsyncing.
I was thinking that the changes for even openoffice, or the kernel might
not be so great even between major release eg FC4 to FC5. Some rpm might
hardly change eg docs and tzdata, or the language packs for openoffice
or kde etc.
The problem is that even if it is a small change, all the source gets
recompiled, so the resultant binaries could be different, and different
enough to cause large amounts of little changes. This is because we
don't just spin the same binaries with say a new doc file or something
like that. Little changes just from a recompile add up quickly.
--
Jesse Keating RHCE (
geek.j2solutions.net)
Fedora Legacy Team (
www.fedoralegacy.org)
GPG Public Key (
geek.j2solutions.net/jkeating.j2solutions.pub)