A more efficient up2date service using binary diffs

[Nigel Metheringham]

On Thu, 2005-03-17 at 09:44 +0100, Kyrre Ness Sjobak wrote:
> Why make it so hard, as to put the workload of generating the diffs to
> the mirrors? As far as i understand, mirrors use some kind of script
> (using rsync?) to copy the contnent of one served resource to their own
> disk, and serve it from there. They copy the contnent of a directory
> from one server to another, and serve it using a run of the mill
> ftp/http-server, hopefully suporting byte-ranges.

Absolutely.  The problem I was addressing is that people seemed to be
coming up with more and more complex schemes (ie breaking rpms into
individual files) which could be very difficult to implement without
needing a smart server.

While we are using 3rd party mirrors to distribute updates we will need
to have absolutely minimal requirements on the server to be smart - pure
dumb file serving over an existing protocol, maybe leveraging byte
ranges as the bleeding edge of requirements.

	Nigel.

-- 
[ Nigel Metheringham           Nigel.Metheringham at InTechnology.co.uk ]
[ - Comments in this message are my own and not ITO opinion/policy - ]