Package: wnpp Severity: wishlist * Package name : apt-dupdate Version : 0.0.1 Upstream Author : me * License : BSD Description : diff-based update of APT's index files
apt-dupdate is beeing written right now. The server part is almost done, the client should be not a big deal. apt-dupdate is similar to the unofficial apt-pupdate package and uses the same base idea: the Packages/Sources files are updated using diff/patch files to the previous version which is already downloaded. The advantage is impressing: daily diffs for Sid are about 35KiB in size (average, bzip2ed) compared to >=3MiB downloaded by APT (for main, gziped). The advantages of apt-dupdate compared to apt-pupdate: - it will actually work. bjb seems to be MIA since the big server compromise, the diff update scripts on people.d.o are apparently not restored - in difference to apt-pupdate, I do not use chains of small diffs, based on days and managed by the server. Instead, the server provides the patch for a md5sum which contains the diffs between the version of the client and the current one (when the server has data for the old version, of course) - it will be faster on high-latency links. apt-pupdate AFAICS needed n*2+2 http requests where n=#days. apt-dupdate will use exactly one request. - it will be faster on low-speed links since one chunk of data compresses much better than n small chunks. apt-dupdate will use bzip2 instead of gzip. -- System Information: Debian Release: 3.1 APT prefers unstable APT policy: (500, 'unstable'), (500, 'testing'), (1, 'experimental') Architecture: i386 (i686) Kernel: Linux 2.6.9 Locale: LANG=de_DE.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=de_DE.UTF-8
