I've fixed a few bugs in my experimental virtual update repository. This is ideal for anyone with a fast computer and a slow internet connection. You can expect savings of up to 70% in bandwidth when updating packages. A Tomcat server (or similar) is required. The release notes to the latest version is here: http://www.wombat.ie/software/rpmdc/releasenotes-0.1.1.html The distribution is here: http://www.wombat.ie/software/rpmdc/downloads/rpmdc-0.1.1.tar.gz I've updated my delta repository (see http://rpmdelta.wombat.ie/rpmdelta/fc3/i386/) however as I only have about 200MB of free space, not all the packages were included. I would like to thank Michael Schroeder from SuSE for pointing out that he's already got an excellent system already working for the SuSE distribution. His delta RPM software compares the content of an RPM on a file by file basis (I'm currently just treating the RPM as one binary blob after expanding the cpio archive). It seems that this approach yields better compression and requires less CPU cycles and memory to generate the delta files. If there is interest I'll explore this approach next. Joe.
