summaryrefslogtreecommitdiff
path: root/COMPILING
diff options
context:
space:
mode:
authorDavid Kalnischkies <david@kalnischkies.de>2013-12-06 12:17:48 +0100
committerDavid Kalnischkies <david@kalnischkies.de>2013-12-13 11:59:49 +0100
commit47d2bc78adb49f3182f9a3d7a4baea363e772d64 (patch)
tree0536df9928330c35d98a8c2a41fb24405cae9ba1 /COMPILING
parent9d39208af5c8c72d3886c70d603921cf427056ee (diff)
implement POC client-side merging of pdiffs via apt-file
The idea of pdiffs is to avoid downloading the hole file by patching the existing index. This works very well, but becomes slow if a lot of patches needs to be applied to reconstruct an up-to-date index and in recent years more and more dinstall (or similar) runs are executed creating more and more pdiffs in the same amount of time, so pdiffs became less useful. The solution is simple: Reduce the amount of patches (which are very small) which need to be applied on top of the index we have available (which is usually pretty big). This can be done in two ways: Either merge the patches on the server-side so that the client has to download only one patch or the patches are all downloaded and merged on the client-side. The first needs a client who is doing one step at a time who can also skip patches if it needs (APT supports this for a long time now). The later is implemented by this commit, but depends on the server NOT merging the patches and the patches being in a strict order in which no patch is skipped. This is traditionally the case for dak, but other repository creators support merging – e.g. reprepro (which helpfully adds a flag indicating that the patches are merged). To support both or even mixes a client needs more information which isn't available for now. This POC uses the external diffindex-rred included in apt-file to do the heavy lifting of merging & applying all patches in one pass, hence to test this feature apt-file needs to be installed.
Diffstat (limited to 'COMPILING')
0 files changed, 0 insertions, 0 deletions