On Friday 05 October 2007 12:04:16 Fr?d?ric Crozat wrote: > Le vendredi 05 octobre 2007 ? 18:56 +0300, Marius Vollmer a ?crit : > > "ext James Sparenberg" <james at linuxrebel.org> writes: > > > Marius, In reply to the space constraint and upgrade done to the > > > entire OS. This was first solved in URPMI for Mandrake around 8.1 > > > (Now called Mandriva) and AFAIK it has been ported into the > > > dist-upgrade feature for dpkg/apt. > > > > I don't know what you are referring to excatly, but I too think that > > there is no fundamental problem to be solved here. > > > > Apt doesn't do the trick of splitting the update into pieces so that > > you don't need to download all package before unpacking the first one. > > I think that in theory it should be possible to only download a > > package immediately before it is unpacked and delete the archive file > > afterwards again. > > > > This approach would make the update much less reliable, tho, since a > > download failure can interrupt it. > > Well, <mandriva hat> urpmi supports this, but it is really difficult to > implement, mostly on big distributions where package names can change, > packages conflicts, etc.. And it become even more difficult when you try > to upgrade from two distro releases in the past to the current one. We > usually need to implement some heuristic to handle such case and not > fallback to "huge transaction which download more than 1GB of packages > before starting upgrade". </mandriva hat> > > I guess it will be easier for Maemo since the device has a small space > capacity and less possible packages to install than a desktop distro. Frederic if I'd known you were here I would have deferred to the more intimate knowledge. Yes I never dared go more than one "release" level at a time. But more than once I used to across the country (in my case USA) to update a box without a problem. Nice to see you again! James
