Virtual update repository using RPM deltas

[Joe Desbonnet]

I've fixed a few bugs in my experimental virtual update repository.
This is ideal for anyone with a fast computer and a slow internet
connection. You can expect savings of up to 70% in bandwidth when
updating packages.

A Tomcat server (or similar) is required. 

The release notes to the latest version is here:
http://www.wombat.ie/software/rpmdc/releasenotes-0.1.1.html

The distribution is here:
http://www.wombat.ie/software/rpmdc/downloads/rpmdc-0.1.1.tar.gz

I've updated my delta repository (see
http://rpmdelta.wombat.ie/rpmdelta/fc3/i386/)
however as I only have about 200MB of free space, not all the packages
were included.

I would like to thank  Michael Schroeder from SuSE for pointing out
that he's already got an excellent system already working for the SuSE
distribution. His delta RPM software compares the content of an RPM on
a file by file basis (I'm currently just treating the RPM as one
binary blob after expanding the cpio archive). It seems that this
approach yields  better compression and requires less CPU cycles and
memory to generate the delta files. If there is interest I'll explore
this approach next.

Joe.