Suggestion : A new way for DNF package index system

[Ömer Fadıl USTA]

Hello everyone

I have a suggestion about making our package system
more efficent for both us and users.

Right now each time whenever a user try to update package index
s/he must download about 50Mb per day for package index.

This might be not a big size/deal for europe or usa on the other hand
this is a big problem for dial up connections or slow connections for
rest of world.

My suggestion is based on just like delta package system of us.
DNF or old yum might send current index's date and md5/sha signature
so server can just send the diff of that date and current package index
instead of sending whole index.

It might look like it will be extra calculation or load for server
but we can overcome this problem just caching 1 week's diffs for
users.

If the user's package index date/signature is older than 1 week then
servers can just send whole index like right now but if it in 1 week
period it can send just cached diff. It will be just kilobytes
instead of 50 Megabytes.

And if the user uses a flag with dnf like --nocache server can send
user whole index instead of delta index.

I believe this will reduce our network bandwith usage and also users
will be much happy about their data usage.


I hope I'm not sending this in wrong list.

Ömer Fadıl Usta
Sevenhill on freenode
omerusta at gmail.com