Thread Hijack - Our package management GUI tools need improvement

[Warren Togami]

Tim Lauridsen wrote:
> 6. Download needed packages.
> 6. Depends on the size of the packages to be downloaded, network 
> bandwidth and the how fast the mirrors are.

Two things could improve package downloading...

1) apt-get can download packages in parallel from multiple mirrors. 
This doesn't help everyone, but it does help in many cases where your 
personal bandwidth is much larger than the limited rate from a single 
mirror.

Could this be implemented as a yum plugin?  I dunno.

2) Ahmed Kamal has been working on a potentially sane implementation of 
deltarpm for Fedora's yum.  Theoretically, it would work as an optional 
yum plugin.  If the deltarpm is substantially smaller than an RPM 
update, then the deltarpm is provided on a mirror.  If the deltarpm is 
not provided, then yum downloads the original RPM instead.  If it 
downloaded a deltarpm, it reconstructs the original RPM and uses GPG to 
verify integrity just like yum would verify plain RPM downloads.

Ahmed probably could use some developer and testing help.  I've been 
encouraging him to be more communicative about his project in order to 
get more help, but I haven't seen any further outreach lately.

Warren Togami
wtogami at redhat.com