On Thu, Nov 06, 2003 at 12:50:03AM +0100, Martin Pitt wrote: > On 2003-11-05 17:37 -0500, Matt Zimmerman wrote: > > It has been suggested many times in the past to apply a similar idea to > > the .debs themselves, rather than their contents. > > But isn't rsync supposed to do this? I don't know exactly how efficiently > it detects and compresses binary differences, but it definitely does it > and not too bad. With rsync, you get both the easy management of complete > debs and the bandwidth-saving of binary diffs. The only problem is that > apt does not support rsync IIRC, but this could be solved by separately > download the new debs into apt's cache with a script using rsync.
No, that is not the only problem, and if it were, it would be easily solved. A large number of rsync clients places too much load on the server, according to the many previous discussions about this subject. See, for example, http://bugs.debian.org/128818, as one of many examples. -- - mdz
