Dear all, with ideas and code (and a lot more) from Anthony, I was able to put together the server part for partial patches in a way that it seems to me that it might be included in dak. The resulting files are available from deb http://merkel.debian.org/~aba/debian sid main contrib non-free (or any other combination of suites and components you like)
However, there are only the dist files on that place, _no_ downloadable pool is available there. The partial files are included in a subdirectory called diff in each "low-level" directory like unstable/main/source, and have an Index-file pointing to the other files, and one or more (at maximum 14) patches. Such an Index-File looks like: Canonical-Path: dists/sid/main/binary-i386/Packages SHA1-History: f3a0c1972021af11782c661d1bd5214f1d443868 13345332 2005-01-04-1633.27 9891de37f8f56b15e2dcffe6b02afa94f8bfa472 13346502 2005-01-05-1633.08 SHA1-Patches: c3ad4f802238c5becefb1551722fd26d00452db4 33228 2005-01-04-1633.27 2314857b6ffed5f55c3f667ec14bba860818a7ad 66436 2005-01-05-1633.08 This means: If the local file dists/sid/main/binary-i386/Packages has the sha1-sum of f3a0c1972021af11782c661d1bd5214f1d443868, take the patch named 2005-01-04-1633.27 (and this patch has the given size and sha1-sum). Of course, this patch is a gz'ed file. The Patches are ed-style, which is better for size. The script is run once every night at about 23:00 UTC. The script itself is available at http://merkel.debian.org/~aba/tiffani If there are any questions, please don't hesitate to speak with me. Cheers, Andi
