Dear Debian, At the end of a slow line it would still be nice to be able to download only the actual binary differences between versions of a package during an upgrade. Especially for larger packages. I'm sure it is possible to do technically, but it may require a very different approach to packaging. For the longer view, yes, the internet is getting faster, but it isn't always fast for everyone and it is nice to think of it as a limited resource. If Debian can make this change then that is many many bytes no longer needing to be shipped, saving energy and connection times for everyone, disk space, etc. Thanks for consideration,
This is already implemented, please install the debdelta package and run debdelta-upgrade before apt-get upgrade/dist-upgrade.
Control: reopen -1 Control: reassign -1 release-notes As mentioned, this is already possible, but probably not documented enough (or in the right place?). Kind regards, Andrei
Hi, Le 10/05/2013 03:51, Andrei POPESCU a écrit : Is it just me, or both Paul and you misunderstood the proposal? It’s about binary packages, not metadata if I understood correctly. Maybe ftp.debian.org would be a more suited pseudo-package if so. Regards David
Hi, Le 10/05/2013 08:51, David Prévot a écrit : just me, sorry. debdelta is not really new, not sure the release-notes is the best place to advertise it, maybe debian-reference would be better suited if not already documented there. Side note: it looks like apt-cacher-ng gain debdelta support in Wheezy, so if someone propose a draft about it, maybe it could make it in the “what’s new” section? Regards David
Upgrading to a new stable release probably results in downloading an order of magnitude more packages than all point releases combined. A hint towards debdelta seems natural, maybe in the "sufficient-space" section. Kind regards, Andrei
Andrei POPESCU wrote: Debdelta may be handy for Testing/Unstable users doing daily upgrades, but I don't see how it's going to be any help for Stable users doing biennial dist-upgrades. Calculating deltas requires stored copies of the previous .debs to diff against. The http://debdelta.debian.net service keeps a set of snapshots, but not 27 months worth: "Summarizing, an end user has a window (of 10 to 50 days) of opportunity to upgrade using debdelta-upgrade". And what do I do with a downloaded delta if I don't have a local copy of the old .deb to "patch" into the new version?
Control: reassign -1 debian-reference You're right, I didn't read up on how it works. Kind regards, Andrei
Hi, Are these DSA support? Are these considered specialized mirror? Regards, Osamu PS: For people on fast connection these days, the latency of getting many diffs for package data is actually the slowing point.
control: reassign 707672 debdelta control: tags 707672 - moreinfo control: retitle 707672 promote debdelta to the official service Hi, http://bugs.debian.org/707672 The original bug report to "general" can be understood as a request to provide package download system already offered by debdelta. It exists and looks like: # apt-get update && debdelta-upgrade && apt-get upgrade But is not yet official part of the service. http://debdelta.debian.net/html/index.html | debdelta is an application suite designed to compute changes between | Debian packages. These changes (that we will call 'deltas') are similar | to the output of the "diff" program in that they may be used to store | and transmit only the changes between Debian packages. This suite | contains 'debdelta-upgrade', that downloads deltas and use them to | create all Debian packages needed for an 'apt-get upgrade'. It seems it is also facing technical challenges to be useful for the mass: http://debdelta.debian.net/html/x182.html#the_enemy_within | 4.4. better deb compression is a worse delta | ... | In recent years, 'dpkg' has transitioned from 'data.tar.gz' to | 'data.tar.bz2' to 'data.tar.lzma'; each method is better at compressing, | but is also slower than the previous one; since it is better at | compressing, it also defeats the ability of 'debdelta' to produce small | deltas (wrt the original deb, of course), and indeed statistics show | that deltas are getting larger; since it is slower, it slows down the | applying of deltas as well. After few bounces, this bug reached to my package "Debian Reference". Considering the state of debdelta, I do not think it is within the scope of information required to be included in "Debian Reference" as of now. I am forwarding this bug to debdelta. When it reaches enough maturity and closes most of TODOs and BUGs: http://debdelta.debian.net/html/x277.html http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?src=debdelta Please prompt me to document this after it becomes part of the standard apt archive. Regards, Osamu