On Sat, 12 Mar 2005, Jeff Johnson wrote: > Hint: xdelta is the wrong approach, because both packages have to exist > on either client or (more likely) server, > leading to a combinatorial complexity of deltas to manage for all > possible updates. > > Try rdiff from librsync instead. I think it depends what you are aiming for. xdelta on the header combined with the uncompressed cpio still gives you the minimal byte transfer, which may be the best solution for really low bandwidth but requires both rpms to be on the server to generate the delta, and the old rpm to be on the client. As to which delta to store on the server the minimal bandwidth solution would be to generate deltas to the latest rpm from each of the preceding rpms, but this would need every rpm (or the first and incremental deltas) to generate. On the other hand rdiff is much more flexible at the cost of a larger bandwidth usage. For example to generate the deltas from all the previous rpms to the current one you just need the current rpm and signature files from all previous rpms, not the complete rpms, so there are advantages at the server end. Also if you could set up some sort of rdiff server which takes a signature file and an rpm name and returns a delta, you probably don't need any rpm on the client machine, as you could use something like rpmrebuild to construct an rpm from installed files and send the signature from that. I am repeating my figures below, and adding similar figures from rdiff as well as xdelta for comparison. Michael Young libgcj-4.0.0-0.31.i386.rpm 13942525 libgcj-4.0.0-0.32.i386.rpm 13950302 xdelta of rpms 6911651 same (no compression) 7025625 xdelta of header + cpio 3723074 same (no compression) 8604163 rdiff of rpms 7310525 same (gzipped) 7159019 rdiff signature of 1st rpm 81708 rdiff of header + cpio 17870597 same (gzipped) 5582770 rdiff signature 190476
