hi I have the same problem with debdelta, so I want to share some ideas
introduction: the command "debdelta-upgrade" downloads deltas , and
then applies them to create all .deb necessary for a
'apt-get upgrade' ; so it is doing more or less the same
my advices are
1) "debdelta-upgrade" has two threads; one thread
downloads the patches and queues them for a second thread, that
applies them; you may do the same with pdiffs
(actually, I see some people saying that patchin is
done in parallel; in case, ignore the above)
2) anyway , it may happen that, in some unfortunate cases, the time of
downloading/patching is so high that it would be more efficient to
just download the new .deb
my solution (that I am implementing in "debdelta-upgrade" ) is
to keep a statistic of the downloading speed (serverwise)
and patching speed, and then do the math and decide
you may do the same ; each time apt-get update is invoked, look at how
many patches are needed, and do a simple computation to decide if it
is faster to download all patches or to download the new Packages.bz2
3) the current structure of pdiffs AFAIK is not optimal ;
there is a better "binary" structure of diffs that works better, that is:
time complexity for end user:
if N (< 128) is the number of changes that occured to Packages file
since the last update, the user needs to download and apply
~ 2 (1 + log_2 (N)) diffs
disk complexity on server:
it will use more space on servers; in this proposed version,
the servers need to store ~ twice the diffs
here is the scheme (in python-ish/shell-ish pseudocode):
this is run on the server, after Packages is changed :
let v be an increasing number, serializing the
successive versions of the packages files in the server
def add_packages_file_to_diff_scheme(Packages):
v = v + 1
for x in 0 , 1 , 3 , 7 , 15 , 31 :
if ( x == 0 ) or ( x & v == 0 ) :
diff /backups/Packages.mask.$x Packages > pdiff.$v.mask.$x
copy Packages /backups/Packages.mask.$x
this is run on the client:
let w be the version number of the Packages that the user has
def update_packages():
while w < v :
for x in 31 , 15 , 7 , 3 , 1 , 0 :
if ( ( x == 0 ) or ( x & w == 0 ) ) and ( w + x + 1 <= v ) :
download pdiff.$w.mask.$x
patch pdiff.$w.mask.$x Packages
w = w + x + 1
break
example: suppose you have version 3 , and the server has version 35 ;
in the current scheme, you would need 32 patches; in my scheme, you need
pdiff.4.mask.0
pdiff.8.mask.3
pdiff.16.mask.7
pdiff.32.mask.15
pdiff.34.mask.1
pdiff.35.mask.0
a.
--
Andrea Mennucc
"E' un mondo difficile. Che vita intensa!" (Tonino Carotone)
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