yum differential updates

[seth vidal]

> additionally... on the serverside the torrents could be created at
> every repo generation time. (to be discussed)

Everyone should remember we're talking about torrents for:

updates
updates-testing
extras


not just one place.

It would mean updated torrents nearly EVERY single day.

I think we'd be better off working on a tool that made it possible for
joe-user to mirror a repository using the http/ftp mirrors already in
existence w/o needing access to an rsync server.

Just so happens Rudolf and I were talking about that today on irc. I
already had some of the code implemented. I'll post a quasi-working
version here in a bit to see if it would be useful to continue working
on.

It uses the yum repo definitions to download all the packages listed in
the metadata. Of course it checks to download only the packages you
haven't already downloaded.

which means it could be almost as effective for an end user to make
their own copy of the mirror w/o having to rsync.

It doesn't have the sharing advantages of bittorrent but it handles
massive and frequent updates a bit better than bittorrent would.

-sv