Suggestion for package handling

[halfnewbie]

About package management... would this work? Would it be worth the trouble?

1. Make the build process create diff files for all packages compared to earlier packages (quite trivial).

2. On the distribution sites, the diff files are stored (all packages with diff files also get a short file listing them).

3. A modified apt-get checks what local versions of the package exist and if there are relevant difference files for that version.

4. After the moded apt-get fetches a diff file and builds the real package, then a checksum is computed. If wrong, an error message is sent and the real package is downloaded instead.

This should be:
- transparent (old apt-get works)
- safe (checksum and getting the full package if error)
- better for servers and people with slow net connections.

Could be a fun kludge -- I don't really have much compassion for hicks with slow connections.

But I have enough hobby projects for this year, though, and I don't really know much about Debian.

Any ideas? Should I forget it or send it in to someone that might care?

[lacek]

I may be wrong, but Gentoo's package management is something like this (at least the 'packages' is compiled on your computer). This, however, altough is a good thing, has the disadvantage that you need to compile every program, so you had to have a lot of time (for example, KDE compiles for hours), and at the next release, compilation starts again... Not to mention that you have to have the sources and the diffs on your computer, or you have to download them every time. The first consumes disk, the second consumes bandwidth...
Anyway, is would be nice to see this in practice... :-)

[halfnewbie]

I wasn't thinking compiling -- just a patch file for the binary package file.

It won't help with compiled binaries -- but usually for documents and source. To start compiling (Gentoo model) would be a large change. This is quite trivial.

The idea is an optimization for a subset of people (those with a few gigs of disk to spare and a slow connection) not a totally different distro philosophy!

[Guest]

This has been discussed in debian earlier. You should search the debian-devel list to find out more about it.

Here is a bug report that is quite interesting reading:

WISH: apt-get update using rsync protocol
http://bugs.debian.org/128818

In this bug report there is a link to this paper:

http://rsync.samba.org/rsync-and-debian/

that is a good read on the subject.

Although your approach is more about xdiff then rsync, they mention xdiff aswell above, and you can find more about it on the mailing-lists.