yum-deltarpm (Was Thread Hijack - Our package management GUI tools need improvement)

[Jonathan Dieter]

On Fri, 2007-03-09 at 12:35 -0500, Warren Togami wrote:
> 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
> 
I've been working with Ahmed and Michael Schroeder (the upstream
maintainer of deltarpm) to track down some long-standing bugs in
deltarpm, especially as it relates to prelinked binaries.  These bugs
were causing very odd problems while working with the yum-deltarpm
plugin.

We *think* we've found them all (the patches are in the latest Rawhide
version of deltarpm in Extras), so I think we're at the point where what
we really need is someone who would be willing to create drpms of all
new packages in Core and Extras (there's a modified version of prunerepo
that does all the work for you), and host them for us.

To give you an idea of the savings we're looking at:
* kdebase-3.5.5-0.4.fc6  => kdebase-3.5.6-0.1.fc6 =  3.5MB vs. 30.2MB
* kdegames-3.5.5-0.1.fc6 => kdegames-3.5.6-0.1.fc6 = 740KB vs. 11.1MB
* OO.o-core-2.0.4-5.5.3  => OO.o-core-2.0.4-5.5.10 = 8.7MB vs. 92.4 MB
There won't be that kind of savings for all the packages, but a general
rule of the thumb is that the bigger the package, the better the chance
that we'll get a good compression ratio on the drpm.

Ahmed, do you have anything to add?
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