Hi, I had a go on this topic as well in early december, but got "distracted" which will be for a bit longer still, so just as a somewhat short reply:
On Sat, Jan 04, 2014 at 08:40:34PM +0800, Anthony Towns wrote: > My patched apt source is up on github at: > > https://github.com/ajtowns/apt/tree/better-pdiffs Looks like you did most of the other half of: https://github.com/DonKult/apt/commits/feature/clientmergepdiffs which implements the proper acquiring of patches and such, but offloads the actual merging to diffindex-rred (provided by apt-file). It also keeps API compatibility and handles reprepro server-merged patches: aka it can switch at will between server-merge [which is currently assumed to be the case, but never done by dak so far] and client-merge [which assumes a strict order of patches as it is done by dak and so would be the better default if it isn't going to change, which I heard before debconf would be done soon… but I might misheard]. A "wild" mixture of both requires indeed more info in the Index. I had run some "benchmarks" back then: (I don't like benchmarks, but anyway) 'normal' pdiff, client-side merged pdiffs and no pdiffs: # apt-get update -o Acquire::PDiffs::Merge=0 Fetched 21.8 MB in 1min 6s (330 kB/s) # apt-get update -o Acquire::PDiffs::Merge=1 Fetched 21.8 MB in 11s (1874 kB/s) # apt-get update -o Acquire::PDiffs=0 Fetched 74.6 MB in 15s (4928 kB/s) Disclaimer: this system has a strange mixture of everything to test some extremes, but for us here it means: >10 indexes patchable by pdiff, >200 pdiffs need to be applied to get up-to-date, http.debian.net as mirror and an (observed) ~10 MB/s connection at my university (– remember that especially 'no pdiff' needs to do a lot of uncompress work, which slows down more than you would guess – as you see here). So, I guess merging both could cross a lot of points of your list and be relatively easily feed into unstable for proper field-testing. (a upload of my part was planed as a christmas present to experimental, but as usual: If you want to make deity laugh, tell her your plans) Best regards David Kalnischkies
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