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author | David Kalnischkies <david@kalnischkies.de> | 2013-12-06 12:17:48 +0100 |
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committer | David Kalnischkies <david@kalnischkies.de> | 2013-12-13 11:59:49 +0100 |
commit | 47d2bc78adb49f3182f9a3d7a4baea363e772d64 (patch) | |
tree | 0536df9928330c35d98a8c2a41fb24405cae9ba1 /doc/apt-cache.8.xml | |
parent | 9d39208af5c8c72d3886c70d603921cf427056ee (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 'doc/apt-cache.8.xml')
0 files changed, 0 insertions, 0 deletions