Maybe I should have posted to debian-devel, but I'm not subscribed and I get enough mail as it is.
I had this idea when I was sitting there watching 768K of package listing for unstable trickle down my flaky, slow modem connection at about 1K/sec, paying my 1 pence per minute to British Telecom when I thought "Why can't I just download what's changed since last time?". Now this seems like a great idea, although in practice it's not that simple, but I think I've thought of a way that would not be too difficult to do, and could (I think) be relatively easy to implement (not that I'm up to the job). If the package listing was archived, say, daily to a Packages-990103.gz file for instance. at a set time (e.g. midnight GMT or whenever the servers are less busy on average), and a backlog of diffs between these files kept for, say, a month, then this would allow apt (assuming local time and date were correct) to only grab the parts of the listing that had changed, created by either diff or xdelta and put back together by something like patch. This is fine, but what if you want that security fic and don't want to wait 20 hours for apt to realise it's there? Well, what if there is also a patch fromt he last archived package listing to the current package listing. e.g Packages-current.diff.gz. apt or whatever could then pick up all the necessary patches up to the last archived packages version, and then save this locally. It could then create a duplicate to apply the Packages-current.diff to and remove this as soon as the next archive is made. and start again. This Packages-current.diff would be recalculated from the Packages-99whatever.gx file whenever a new package was uploaded or moved from incoming by the ftp maintainer. The old system would still be there, available for use by existing tools, just that these new files would be available for more efficient use by tools that support this way of working. Anyway, that was just my twopence while I wait for apt-get update to do it's job. It was just an idea that is quite simple, yet seems very long-winded in writing. If someone wants to ridicule me for putting forward a silly idea, then please do. It was after all just an idea that crossed my mind. Aha! apt-get update's finished. Time to hit send. -- Russell G. Howe <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> -- http://rhowe.8m.com/new/ -- 212.38.66.144 There is is no reason for any individual to have a computer in their home. -- Ken Olsen (President of Digital Equipment Corporation) 1977
