Modern Update System

[Michael Schroeder]

On Tue, Nov 29, 2005 at 04:07:19PM -0500, Benjy Grogan wrote:
> What would be the size of said deltarpms for Openoffice?

That depends on the changes in the Openoffice package.
Lets see...

Update from 1.9.125 to 2.0.0: 10 Mbyte.
Update from 1.99.3  to 2.0.0:  4 Mbyte.

On avarage deltas are about 5%-10% of the rpm size.

> Are there any drawbacks to the deltarpms?

Well, the deltas are between two version. So if you want them to
work with a distribution that changes a lot like fedora (i.e.
if you don't do just maintenance updates) you have two possibilities:

- delete all of th old deltas and create deltas between the old
  versions and the current one. The drawback is that you have to keep
  the old rpms around for delta generation (they don't need to be in
  the repo, though) and the mirrors have to fetch all the new
  deltas.
- create only one delta between the last version and the new one.
  This creates a chain of deltas, so the mirrors only have to pick
  up one delta. The disadvantage is that you have to use a special
  server that combines the deltas on the fly or, if you don't want
  that, clients that have an old version must fetch more than one
  delta and combine them.

In any case, keeping deltas against the last 10 versions roughly
doubles the repo size.

Cheers,
  Michael.

-- 
Michael Schroeder                                   mls at suse.de
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